


Count Backwards From Three

by Zizzani



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-01-23 11:44:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21319657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zizzani/pseuds/Zizzani
Summary: When Lance wakes up with a severe case of amnesia that's erased the past 2 years of his life, he's shocked to find out that he's apparently an instrumental pilot to the strongest defender in the universe.He's even more shocked to find out that he has not one, but TWO boyfriends. And that those boyfriends are his hero and his sworn rival.***A fic about finding your way backwards by finding your way forwards.Lance gets knocked really hard in the head during an intense battle, and when he wakes up, he's forgotten the last two years of his life. This includes being part of Voltron, travelling space, and oh yeah, falling deeply, madly in love with the two people he looks up to most in the world. Lance has to reforge those connections in order to try and retrieve his memory. But it's pretty freaking hard when that means trying to get along with Keith and look Shiro in the eye long enough to form a sentence.Prepare for some light angst, smut, and a lot of hilarity.Oh, and Hunk & Allura are dating.
Relationships: Allura & Hunk (Voltron), Keith/Lance (Voltron), Keith/Lance/Shiro (Voltron), Keith/Shiro (Voltron), Lance/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 84
Kudos: 506





	1. ...6 ...

**Author's Note:**

> I've been wanting to write a Shklance fic for AGES because I think it's my fave ship, and honestly taking a crack at it has been eating at me. Hope you enjoy!

Coming to was a weird feeling.

Lance was in an abyss. He’d fallen over the edge some time ago but he hadn’t hit the bottom. He was hovering, suspended on gossamer somewhere between waking and unconsciousness as his mind floated towards the faint, low rumbling he could hear. It felt like it was coming from a place outside his mind, and he stretched towards it naturally, wanting to feel the vibrations through the thin glass that encased his consciousness.

“-e’s waking u-.”

“Shh! -on’t crowd hi-”

“-meone get -eith and Shi-”

Lance groaned, his lips rolling the sound over sluggishly, thick like tar. It was a mistake.

The pain that split his head felt like a fissure rupturing his skull. Lance gasped in shock, his body flattening back into the bed as his muscles locked in tension. 

“Whoa whoa wait! Just hold on a sec, bud,” a familiar voice soothed him.

Lance was distantly aware of a hand pressing gently against his shoulder, a liquid warmth that oozed over his skin, not quite beginning and not quite ending. Just… There.

“Hunk?” he tried to say. 

But his vocal chords chafed up against each other so the sound came out rusty. It made Lance wonder when he’d last used his voice.

He tried again. This time, he managed to improve his volume at the expense of his pronunciation.

“Whaa happ’n?”

“Lie back, buddy, easy. There you go,” Hunk murmured.

His inflection told Lance that the words were supposed to be gentle, but his head disagreed with this idea and beat out a violent protest against Lance’s temples. He groaned unhappily, and the sound of that, too, was slurred and formless. More of a drawn out guttural sigh than an actual intonation.

“Oh, Lance my boy! Good to see you’re awake!”

Lance winced immediately. It was a few seconds later when he didn’t feel like his eyeballs were melting that he managed to open his eyes to see a rather bizarre looking man stood beside his bed. He was dressed in elegant garb, the block colour lining with glimmering gold threading, and his hands were sheathed in gleaming white gloves. His top lip seated a rather magnificent moustache in a violent shade of orange. This alone made Lance squint, but when he glanced up to the man’s gaze he briefly considered that he may be hallucinating. For under the gentleman’s eyes, sat as though they had been carved there, were two delicate pearlescent markings in a pale shade of teal. It got worse from there. As Lance tried to look away from them, his vision snapped on the pointed tip of the guy’s ears. Lance groaned and shut his eyes to avoid having to process that. There was safety in darkness, from both light and from bizarre things he couldn’t parse at that moment.

“If you hadn’t been up in a varga, we’d have had to chemically wake you. Not the nicest business, I’m afraid. Especially with a severe concussion. But it would have been dangerous to let you sleep anymore.”

The complaint that kicked the inside of Lance’s skull tripled at the elevated gumption in the man’s tone. What the guy lacked in eloquence he made up for in enthusiastic chatter. This worked well for Lance, since a penchant for enthusiastic chatter was stitched into his genes, and together they provided a conversational springboard for each other. But on this particular occasion, it only worked so far as to dampen one side of the dialogue. 

Lance groaned a second time, making to shield his eyes from the offensive overhead lights. He got as far as unleashing one arm in an uncoordinated lurch before his body rolled with the action. Lance’s head protested so strongly at that, that he gave up altogether and allowed himself to go boneless against the soft mattress beneath his back.

“You took quite a conk to the old mainframe there,” the man chirped brightly.

He was either oblivious to Lance’s pain or simply thought it unimportant, since he did nothing to diminish his volume. Either way, it took a solid moment for Lance to roll the words into a sentence he vaguely understood.

“I took a what?” he croaked.

“You hit your head,” Hunk translated mercifully. “Really hard, actually. I’ve never heard a noise that scary before. You should have seen how Keith and Shiro reacted.”

Lance courageously attempted to open one eye before deciding that the bright teal lights above him were nefarious foes that would have to be battled at a later date.

Absently, he asked, “Who?”

Hunk snorted, “Who? Who do you think? Keith and Shiro. Red and Black paladins, respectively, of Voltron, defender of the universe. You know? That awesome team you’re a part of?”

And Lance did know, sort of. Or rather, he hadn’t until Hunk had just said so, and then Lance had felt recognition flicker into life in the back of his head like a wire being plugged back into the server.

“Oh yeah, Voltron. Yeah, I know,” he mumbled, though he knew the name and not much beyond that.

Lance risked a second attempt at opening his eyes. This time, the teal lighting was less intense. Lance was beginning to be able to see round it, the bright lines of illumination cutting wiry paths through darker planes of blue and grey. It looked fantastically futuristic, a pattern of glowing teal and cobalt that Lance’s eyes slid over with ease. 

Hunk was quiet for a moment. If Lance had been capable of it at that time, he probably would have recognised the tension that hung in those brief seconds of silence. But as it was, he was currently trying to convince the watery impulses swimming through his head to avoid accidentally hitting the eject button on his stomach. His tongue tasted like metal, and Lance vaguely wondered if it was from the rust in his voice box. 

“How are you feeling?” Hunk asked him.

Lance allowed himself a brief reprieve from the labyrinthine lights of the room to take stock of his body. There was a heaviness trapping his limbs to the bed, but it fortunately hadn’t progressed into pain. It was merely a side effect of the throbbing in his head. That was the source of his misery; the shell of his skull felt so brittle that the insides of his ears ached, and Lance was convinced he could feel the roots of his teeth digging into the hard pulp of his gums. The thought had his thoughts sweeping dangerously close to the flush valve of his gut.

“Shit,” he grunted. “It feels like I got his by a tank.”

“Actually, it was a gwyllian warmonger. Those things pack a punch,” the moustached man called.

He’d vanished to the other side of the room whist Lance had been peeling back his eyelids, but now he appeared by the blue paladin’s side brandishing a rather crooked looking syringe. “Frankly, dear boy, I’m amazed your spine isn’t broken.”

“What?” Lance blurted. 

Hunk shot the man his best scowl as he lifted his hands to calm Lance once again. It didn’t stop the boy in the bed from eyeing the man’s utensil as warily as he could manage with a splitting headache. The man seemed to get the message, though, and he thankfully tucked his hands behind his back, safe away from the tools.

“You basically got hit my a locomotive,” Hunk clarified. “You made it go straight for you, too. Stupidest thing I’ve ever seen you do, and I’ve seen you do _ a lot _of stupid things.”

“Thanks, big guy,” Lance fired back weakly. 

“You’re welcome,” Hunk replied without missing a beat. “Pretty much saved the day though. It got the thing away from Pidge long enough for her to enter the detonation codes. Shiro and Keith took care of the rest.”

“Pidge...” Lance echoed.

The name prodded against his mind, trying to find the right socket to complete the circuit. Small sparks of recognition came to Lance in jolts that went directly to his cerebral. Mousey hair. Grey eyes. No! Amber. Hazel? They became a different shade went Lance looked at them through glasses. Oh yeah, Pidge wore glasses, right?

“Are we talking about Pidge Gunderson? From the Garrison?”

“Uh, Pidge Holt, technically,” Hunk corrected him.

The name gave Lance a physical reaction. His body tried to jerk upright to accommodate the five yards his mind had jumped ahead in that one breath. He succeeded in gracelessly popping several of his limbs out of the cradle of the bed before he was even halfway upright.

“Holt!” he cried. “You mean like Sam and Matt Holt? The scientists from the Kerberos mission?”

Hunk chuckled, but the sound of it was pale and weak, and the smile that went with it was more of a grimace.

“Ha ha, very funny, Lance. You know that’s her family.”

Lance blinked, a break cutting the circuit. “Pidge is a girl?”

“Pidge is whatever Pidge wants to be,” a new voice entered the room, turning all three heads in unison.

It only took one glance for Lance to know who it was. The name matched directly with the image he’d built in his head. Mousey hair framing a heart shaped face, two flat planes of glass magnifying the honey brown eyes beneath. There was something interesting there too. A lilt in the tone of her voice that seemed like it was made with the sharp smirk of her grin in mind.

“Uh, hi,” Lance managed. “I’m Lance.”

“Yeah, I know, you dork,” Pidge chided as she marched over and seated herself quite forcefully on the edge of his bed.

She narrowed her eyes into slits as she looked Lance over, peering at him with a comically deep scowl. With one hand, she reached out and administered a cruel flick to the centre of his forehead. Lance felt the vibration of it ripple through the entirety of his soft tissue, as loud and shattering as a gong, and the resulting echoes shimmered sickeningly about his eardrums.

Lance lurched backwards away from the flick on reflex, a sharp gasp twisting out of his throat.

“Pidge!” Hunk hissed horrified.

“What?” Pidge asked flatly.

Lance answered with a soft strained moan oozing out from between his lips. Not that he could hear it; he was too busy fighting a battle against the churning of his gut.

“Oh shit,” Pidge muttered as Lance clasped his stomach, his hands pale and shaking against the stark white of the medical suit. “I didn’t realise it was that bad.”

“You didn’t think it was _ that bad _ ?” Hunk seemed to be straining between keeping quiet for the sake of Lance’s headache and speaking loudly enough to emphasise his point, resulting in a rather strained stage whisper. “Pidge, you _ saw _how hard that thing hit him.”

Lance wanted to interject to ask just how fast that thing was, and what ‘that thing’ meant. What had the guy with the moustache said? Gyllian something? But his stomach performed a particularly elaborate somersault, and he was forced instead to wave an arm out wildly until he caught a weak grasp of Hunk’s shirt.

He managed to wheeze an urgent, “Hunk!” just as saliva flooded his mouth with a watery metallic taste and a sharp ache punched his glands.

The urgency in Lance’s tone must have telegraphed because Hunk miraculously produced a basin just as Lance rolled over the edge of the bed and promptly acquainted to floor with the contents of his stomach. The thick warm pad of Hunk’s hand rubbed soothing circles between Lance’s shoulder blades as he gagged and spat into the bowl.

“That’s it, buddy,” he murmured in a gentle tone that fell in awful contrast to Lance’s ragged heaving. “Let it all out. You’ll feel better afterwards.”

Lance was not inclined to agree as his stomach rolled in another threatening spasm. He took deep, rasping breaths as spittle dripped from his mouth. 

“Think you’re gonna be sick again?” Hunk asked after a few moments.

Lance shook his head no. The action immediately made him rethink his answer. Mercifully, Hunk held the bowl in front of him for a few moments more before placing it down and helping Lance roll onto his back. Lance was dimly aware of the sound of the bucket being lifted, the curved base scraping the floor reedily, followed by the sound of footsteps as the waste was removed. Hunk’s hands stayed on him all the while, pressing gentle caresses across his shoulders.

“Feel any better?” he asked. 

Lance went to nod and then, remembering his earlier mistake, parted his lips to breath out a shaky, “Yeah. Thanks.”

“Okay good, because you need to drink this.”

Lance cracked an eye open as Pidge spoke to see her holding a glass of the strangest liquid he’d ever seen.

It looked like liquid diamond, light spilling off of it in brilliant rainbow fractals as the mixture span in the glass. It was enough to get Lance to open his eyes fully, though his head still pulsed stubbornly against the assault of luminance.

“What is that?” he breathed.

The glittering spirals of colour were so inviting that Lance felt compelled to reach out to them. It was only when his hand reached halfway that he realised if he reached for it then Pidge would likely give it to him, and then he’d feel compelled to drink it. His hand froze midway; he didn’t even know what it was yet.

“It’s silverale,” Pidge told him. “It’s four times as hydrating as water and full of electrolytes, like the ones you just spat into a can. Drink it. You’ll feel better.”

Lance eyed it dubiously as Pidge tapped her fingers against the glass. 

When he still didn’t move to reach the rest of the distance, Pidge sighed and shifted her glasses up her nose.

“And also, I kinda feel bad for making you throw up. I didn’t think you were gonna react like that.”

She tipped the glass a little towards him, a minute salutation. That, paired with the remorse swimming across Pidge’s features was enough for Lance to cave, and he finally gave into the temptation to reach out and pluck the glass from her small fingers. He brought the glass to his lips, affording it a cautious sniff as Hunk helped him sit upright. His body responded stiffly, moving in short jerks and unrefined starts. The sparkling mixture didn’t smell like much of anything, and so Lance hesitantly brought it to his lips. There were several things you expected a crystalline water to taste like on first inspection. Lance had a fleeting notion of the glittering pony toys his sister had played with when they were younger, and briefly thought the drink may taste of the plastic, artificial scent of strawberry that had always plagued them. He thought it might taste of salt, since the glittering look like sunlight against the ocean waves.

There were several things Lance did not expect the liquid to taste like, and incidentally, it tasted of all of them simultaneously. There was a sharpness like citrus, biting and stinging his tongue, followed by the rich earthiness of petrichor and violet. They were tangled together with a consistency like full fat milk, and Lance felt each fractal hit his tongue in an electrifying burst of flavour, like they were pairing with each taste bud in a complicated dance. With so many sensations trying to fight against the cage of his mouth, Lance spluttered inelegantly into the glass. 

Two fingers pressed against the base of it as he tried to pull away.

“Finish it all, there’s a lad,” the moustached man told him firmly.

Lance didn’t feel like he had the energy to resist; the man’s press of the glass to his lips was harder than he expected, and so Lance had little choice but to diligently swallow down the liquid. He could feel it zapping away at the lining of his stomach where it sat heavily like molten metal. Lance’s gut quivered in warning, and so he took several slow breaths to calm the dizzying sense of nausea that ran in ripples over his skin.

“Urgh,” he groaned as the glass was whisked away from his fingers.

Hunk kindly resumed rubbing circles against Lance’s back, the motion rhythmic and warm like a lullaby. Once the sickness had passed, Lance finally managed to look up again, his eyes landing on the orange-haired man. He was tinkering away in the corner, hands a flurry of movement, back ramrod straight despite bending forward.

Lance waited until he was suitably distracted to lean forward and whisper, “Hunk.”

Hunk looked at him with curiosity. Lance pointed discreetly at the manic man.

“Who is that guy?”

Hunk looked at him again, but this time his expression was once of strict confusion that was slowly peeling away into dawning horror.

When he opened his mouth, he uttered no more than a breathless, “Uh oh.”

“Uh oh?” Pidge echoed. “What’s ‘uh oh’?”

Lance, too, wanted to know what was ‘uh oh’, but the look of intense panic that varnished Hunk’s features was making a convincing argument otherwise.

“Uuuh, Lance, buddy,” Hunk began carefully. “What’s um… Do you know what year it is?”

Lance frowned. Of course he knew what year it was, and he opened his mouth to explain this exact sentiment to Hunk when he paused, the question clicking into place. Suddenly, he didn’t feel so sure.

“Uh… 2146?”

Even as he said it, Lance knew it was the wrong answer. His friends’ confirmed this fear, Hunk with a large grimace, and Pidge with a slow blink of her widening eyes.

Softly, but with great feeling, she uttered, “Uh oh.”

“Close,” Hunk coughed out. It sounded like he was trying very hard not to choke on the word. “That was close. You wanna give it another go, buddy?”

Lance chewed his lip nervously until Hunk added, “There’s no wrong answer.”

“Well, I mean, _ actually-” _

Hunk cut Pidge off with an insistent _ shush. _

“Just try to think,” he encouraged.

And Lance did try. He pushed himself back as far as the elastic of his mind would bow, even though it made his eardrums ring.

“21… 2150?”

“Almost,” Hunk smiled weakly. The rubs against Lance’s back looped a little faster. “It’s 2152.”

Lance nodded numbly. How could he have forgotten what year it was? Who _ did _ that? What he really that dumb? The date went pattering in jaunty footsteps across his thoughts. 2152. He’d enlisted in the Garrison with Hunk in 2148, after they’d made the decision to go together in 2146. That meant there was a two year shaped leap in his mind.

“Lance,” Pidge started, the snark scraped free from her voice. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

Lance swallowed. He knew logically that it was important to answer as truthfully as he could. And yet, at the same time, the truth felt condemning. There was something he was missing, and it was colouring his friends’ faces with a frightening shade of pale.

“You said you remember Voltron,” Hunk prompted, hope pressing in on his voice.

Lance did remember Voltron, as a name. He could not remember it as a thing or a shape of a colour, though, and the name on it’s own felt like it wasn’t enough to appease Hunk’s worry. He stretched out a corner of his mind, trying to pull his memory into a patch it was reluctant to go.

“I remember… The desert. Sneaking out the Garrison,” he began carefully. 

Pidge had been there, right? Right. He couldn’t remember exactly, but he got a vague impression of green clothes and a brash protectiveness over technology.

“Good,” Hunk shuffled closer. “That’s good, man. Anything else?”

“Uuuuuh…”

Lance combed through his mind, digging his fingers as deep as he dared without triggering another wave of nausea. It didn’t feel like there was a drop off point in his mind; the memories didn’t race ahead only to skim off the lip of a cliff into an empty abyss below. It was more like the road they were travelling thinned until they could only fit through in scrapes and bursts of sensorium: The cadence of a laugh, a colour he’d never seen before flickering behind his eyelids, the cool brush of a fingertip beneath his chin. It was maddening in that it only made his body itch where those sensations ghosted.

His ears rang when a new voice filled the room, announcing in a strange accent, “Oh, Lance! It’s good to see you awake!”

The voice was flanked by the sound of multiple pairs of feet tapping across the floor in a frantic scurry.

“Lance!”

This voice was rougher, deeper, a little frayed around the edges with strain, and Lance blinked his eyes open as much as he could stand against the continued assault the light was inflicting on his brain. The urgent footfalls scuffled into an aborted stop, and suddenly the mattress was sinking with a new weight as someone’s hand pressed warm against his cheek. The rough pad of a thumb skimming his cheekbone was enough incentive for Lance to turn his face into the curve of the stranger’s palm, a small sight escaping his lips as he relinquished the fight to open his eyes.

“Woah woah, buddy, just hang on a sec,” Hunk’s voice came in, and then his hands interfered further as the stranger’s hand was carefully but insistently stripped away from Lance’s face.

The interruption did not go without protest from both parties. Lance as he groaned low in the back of his throat at the loss of warmth. 

The stranger’s objection was more forceful, and with increasing volume, he yelped, “Hunk, what’re you- Hey _ stop! _Let me go!”

Lance groaned again, this time from the twinge that snapped like elastic against his temple.

“Please, no shouting…”

The skirmish that rattled beside the bed halted almost immediately, leaving the room quiet enough for the next voice to enter.

“Lance, hey, how are you feeling?”

There was a richness to this new tone, one that made Lance feel instantly more relaxed. This sounded like someone in charge, someone that might be able to help...

Someone vaguely familiar...

When Lance failed to muster more than a weak grumble, Pidge answered in his place with a careful, “Weeeee might have a problem.”

“What’s wrong?”

There was that strange accent again, and it was enough for Lance’s curiosity to claim victory over his headache as he peeled back his eyelids to seek the source. He thought he saw a cloud first, maybe, but it sharpened into a cascade of snow white hair as his vision began to cooperate. Lance followed the path of it up to where it curled over a pair of strong shoulders and further still along a slim neck until his eyes settled of the speaker’s face.

Lance had seen many pretty girls before, but as he blinked his spotted vision clear, he thought he might have finally understood the difference between ‘pretty’ and ‘beautiful’.

The girl couldn’t have been much older than him, but she stood with her chin high enough that the lights bounced off her high cheekbones, illuminating the rich brown skin of her face enough to make her iridescent eyes glitter.

“Woah-” he breathed, like his mouth remembered the shape of awe. “Who are you?”

The girl’s mouth twisted unhappily, and Lance felt a twinge of embarrassment at not having introduced himself. He extended one hand in an attempt to rectify. Lifting one eyebrow seemed like a dangerous game to be playing when bile sat in a sour patch behind his tongue, but he decided it was worth the risk, as he shot the girl his most charming smile.

“The name’s Lance.”

He concluded his introduction with a wink that may have slid off into a grimace at the jerk of his head, but he fought to keep his smile in place, hoping it would smooth over that particular mishap.

The girl’s brow twisted as well, furrowing sharply as she sent a wild look in Hunk’s direction. Automatically, Lance followed her gaze, and his eyes took a moment to cooperate before he managed to focus on his best friend.

Who wasn’t alone, Lance realised in an instant. Hunk loomed over a smaller, more wiry figure, one thick arm belted unrelentingly around their waist despite the figure’s writhing. Lance blinked to take in a shock of black hair, dark as a smudge of ink and just as messy before the person succeeded in twisting beyond Hunk’s grip and darting to the lip of Lance’s bed. He jumped in surprise as warm knuckles grazed along his jaw, and he unthinkingly allowed his eyes to close for a brief moment. When he opened them, he jumped a second time in horror. This jump was bigger than the first, and was high enough for his head to bang painfully at the jarring revolt of Lance’s body.

“What?- You- _ KEITH?!” _

Lance spat the name like an expletive, and felt it burn his lips on the way out. 

Beside his bed, stooped so that he was almost eye level with Lance, was none other than Keith Kogane. Lance felt his head pound again, but it was with a fresh rush of blood fuelled by knee jerk resentment. He recognised the choppy black locks that brushed the other boy’s shoulders and hooded his eyes. Lance could pick those violet irises out of a line up and condemn them with bitter victory. So many times they had been turned towards him with a cool disinterest that he could feel scrape over his skin. It had always left him feeling so raw, like Keith was looking through him, right down to the core, and the vulnerability was so unbearable that he couldn’t help but lash out.

But now the eyes that sat on him weren’t cool or disinterested. They were bright and alert, clear of disdain and wide with confusion. The lack of coldness to Keith’s gaze left Lance feeling more stripped than he ever had been on the receiving end of a glare. It made his heart twitch, caught between fear and anger. Keith’s hand hovered unsteadily in the space between them as if he’d stopped it from reaching out halfway, a bird lost at sea. He moved it to roost on Lance’s shoulder, and that was ultimately all it took for fear to claim victory over Lance’s emotions.

He struck out harshly, smacking Keith’s hand away hard with the back of his wrist.

“What the hell, don’t _ touch _me!”

Lance thought, not unreasonably, that all things considered, he hadn’t said anything that severe. After all, he hadn’t raised his voice or his fists.

Even so, hush settled over the room abruptly. 

The quiet following all the hustle and bustle upon Lance’s waking was so stark that he instinctively curled in on himself, shrinking as every eye in the room turned on him and Keith.

It was the boy in question that spoke first. Keith’s voice was thin, like someone had peeled away the roughness of it, leaving him uncertain and reedy.

“Lance… What- What’s wrong?” Then, turning to Hunk, voice cracking dangerously. “What’s wrong with him?”

Lance winced, and the room winced with him at the uncharacteristic break in Keith’s voice. It wasn’t a sound Lance thought he’d heard before in his life, and it wasn’t one he thought ht much wanted to hear again. It was a ghostly comparison to the deadpan sarcasm Keith usually spoke to anyone who addressed him. The question itself had everyone’s eyes back on Lance, and, feeling vulnerable, he lashed out once again.

“Why are you here?” he demanded of Keith. Then, turning to Hunk. “Why is he here?”

Hunk visibly wilted, his shoulders hiking up to brush his ears.

“Why is everyone asking _ me?? _” he wailed.

“Keith is here because he’s a part of this team.”

There was that voice again, deep, authoritative, reassuring.

Vaguely familiar... 

Lance felt his ears itch as he sat up a little straighter, inclining his body towards the speaker. Something shifted behind Hunk, and then the person who spoke was stepping out from behind him, coming to stand tall beside Keith.

“As are you.”

Lance’s eyes widened as he took in the image of the man in front of him. They’d passed each other in the hallways before, Lance hazily recalled, but it had always been at a safe distance. Far enough away that Lance could get away with openly staring if he just pretended to be reading something on the bulletin board from across the corridor. Up close the man looked taller, his shoulders broader, and his jaw more square. The vaguely familiar voice…

“Holy shit,” Lance breathed. He didn’t have the brain function to be embarrassed at the awe that sat thick in his throat. “You’re Takashi Shirogane! I’ve seen you on TV! A-and… And at the Garrison, you taught some of the advanced fighter pilot classes.”

Classes that Keith had walked into whilst Lance had been repeatedly batted down into cargo pilot lectures, but he didn’t want to bring that up in front of Shiro.

Takashi Shirogane didn’t look exactly the same as he had on the television. His signature sweep of hair that fell between his eyes was shockingly white, and his right arm glinted in an ominously metallic way that Lance couldn’t focus on right then. The lines in his face were a little more prominent, digging grooves below his eyes and between his brows, and the steel in his irises glinted sharper.

Lance could feel nervousness run through his blood like an engine, and the sputtering start of it had a torrent of babble staggering up his throat.

“You- You’re like, my hero, dude. Youngest pilot ever to lead a mission into space! Congrats by the way. It’s so cool to meet you in person.”

Lance felt the compulsion to punctuate the end of his sentence with a handshake. He lifted his hand halfway to complete the action, and then thought better, dropping it back into the sheets like a stone. He nearly dropped his eyes too, but it was snagged by the sharp point of Shiro’s gaze as his brow furrowed in obvious concern. 

Something entirely unexpected happened then. Shiro leaned forward side by side with Keith, bracing one hand against the mattress and bringing the other to lie flat against Lance’s forehead. The fingers were cooler than Keith’s, but softer, and more gentle. There was no stray thumb rubbing over his skin, just then tender weight of another feathering along his flesh. For a second, Lance forgot about the throbbing in his temples.

Shiro’s voice was so low when he spoke that it made Lance feel like he was intruding on something private, even as Shiro addressed him directly. “Are you feeling okay?”

Lance felt his eyebrow raise so high they must have brushed obscenely against the skin of Shiro’s palm. His mouth did something obscene as well, and he let a word tumble from his lips half-formed.

“Whaaa….?”

“Is he sick?” Shiro said a little louder.

He was clearly addressing Hunk, though his gaze remained firmly on Lance’s. The evenness of the grey in Shiro’s eyes held him like a steel clamp. So much so that Lance resisted the urge to shrink away from such intensity; to do so would feel like flagrant disobedience, and he didn’t want to insult his hero.

“Aaaaaand _ that _would be our problem,” Pidge finally chimed in, somewhat smugly.

Lance would have turned to stick his tongue out at her, but he was still caught in the snare of Shiro’s gaze. When the older man finally turned to look away, it was something of a relief; there was only so much Lance could handle on a severe concussion. Shiro’s hand remained, however, though it moved to settle on Lance’s bicep, squeezing a little in reassurance.

Lance remained very still under the calm weight of it. He didn’t know if it was to save spooking Shiro, or to save spooking himself; jostling the hand that lay over his arm would require acknowledging it was there to begin with, and Lance was having a very hard time processing the fact that his idol was offering him comfort.

Pidge shot the group of them a wry smile as she triumphantly lifted the small tablet in her hands to show them a screen patterned with a variety of ludicrous graphs.

With a concerning amount of cheeriness, Pidge announced, “I think Lance might have retrograde amnesia.”

Lance decided that that tidbit of information was definitely not on the list of things he could handle on a severe concussion. 

“What?!” 

The yelp of incredulity came from Keith, and the volume made Lance hiss through his teeth. Keith stood up straight as his brows pinched, mouth turning downs at the corners in a way that bordered on comical. He looked five seconds short of releasing his infamous temper, and Lance’s eyes ached with the urge to roll them in their sockets. He’d seen Keith lose his cool several times at the Garrison, and had not hesitated to brand the boy’s notorious outbursts as little more than infantile tantrums. It made him feel better about his own tantrums, as though Keith was lowering the bar for him. 

“Are you serious?” Keith huffed, voice rising. _ “Amnesia?” _

Shiro’s grip tightened around Lance’s arm, and the action shifted very quickly from comforting to worrying. 

Lance turned the word over in his mind, observing it the way he would a smooth stone found on a beach. It didn’t feel particularly frightening until he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to see Hunk fidgeting.

He was tugging at the ragged pieces of skin surrounding his nails, lip quivering when he succeeded in tearing one away from the digit. It was one of his many nervous habits, which Lance had categorised neatly into a richter scale of anxiety. General worry had Hunk holding his fists close to his chest, worries about love made him chew his lip as though anticipating the feeling of a kiss. Picking at his cuticles was reserved for dire consequences. Lance felt a soft thrum of panic circulate through him as he watched Hunk agitate another loose thread of skin.

“Pretty sure,” Pidge nodded sagely in answer to Keith’s question. “He thought it was 2146 when he woke up.”

Lance shot her a glare at the betrayal. “I corrected myself,” he argued.

Pidge just snorted, soft and derisive, in return. “Yeah, to 2150.”

“That’s _ two years!” _Keith’s voice was taut as a wire. “It’s 2152!”

Lance felt the sharpness of Keith’s gaze turn on him like a physical weight, and then an extra set of pounds was added when Shiro turned to stare at him as well.

Carefully, he asked, “You don’t remember anything beyond 2150?”

Lance screwed up his face at the inquisition. He pushed his mind down memory lane as far as it would stretch, but the pictures remained blurry and muffled. The sharpest one he could sculpt into a coherent recollection was the feeling of a cool night’s air sweeping his cheek and Pidge’s voice saying something that felt significant.

_ They keep repeating one word; Voltron. _

“I remember...” he began, and then paused. The memory didn’t feel entirely real, and speaking it aloud seemed like lying. But the Pidge’s diagnosis cut a neon sign through the forefront of his apprehension, and he pushed forward regardless.

“We snuck out of the Garrison dorms and went up to the roof. Pidge said something about tracking activity and a funny word. Voltron?”

The feeling of worry solidified when Shiro’s grip tightened again before loosening suddenly.

“Lance,” there was that low voice again, and Lance hesitated to meet the older man’s gaze, lest he be snared by it once more. “Can you remember anything at all after that?”

There was a lot to be said for just how far Lance stretched his mind. Pushing it beyond that last clear memory felt like trying to open a locked door with a credit card; it seemed easy in movies, but ultimately when attempted, one wound up with a twisted plastic card and a door that was still locked. He winced fiercely as the strain caused a barb of hot pain to score through the soft indent of his temple. All he’d really succeeded in doing was twisting the plastic of his brain. 

“No. It’s weird,” he murmured, disappointed. At himself most of all. “Everything after that is just random sensations. Like… Like the sound of someone’s laugh but I don’t remember who was even laughing in the first place.”

The confusion came to a startling halt as Shiro’s hand slipped heavily from his arm. The cool of Lance’s skin in its absence was unpleasant, and his nerve endings shuddered as they collectively called out to the missing heat.

“Coran,” Shiro straightened to address the bizarre orange-haired man. “We should run some tests on Lance. See if there’s anything we can do to reverse the damage.”

Coran appeared in a burst of colour next to the bed, his moustache bouncing with the vigour of his movements. 

“Way ahead of you, Shiro. I’ve already run a complete physical on Lance. He’s a little dehydrated, despite the silverale we gave him. And we should try to keep him awake now he’s up to avoid any further injury to his brain. He’s suffered a rather severe concussion.”

Shiro nodded steadily at the stream of information. Lance took his current preoccupation as an opportunity to look at Shiro in profile.

He was just as handsome from the side; a strong straight nose and a jawline that could cut stone. 

Lance watched it ripple over his jugular as Shiro asked, “And his memory?”

“Ah.” The noise Coran made said more with a single inflection than all the words that came after. “Yes, about that. I’m afraid that’s not something a healing pod can fix.”

“What does that mean?” Keith interjected.

Lance’s eyes slipped from Shiro over to Keith only to see the other boy already staring hard at him, violet eyes almost glowing with pressure.

“It means that we’re just going to have to wait for Lance’s memory to come back on its own. If at all!” Coran chirped. He was so full of energy that even his regretful tone sounded buoyant.

Apparently it wasn’t elevating enough for Keith though, and his lips peeled back to reveal his teeth.

“We can’t just sit here and do _ nothing, _” he growled, and the words felt like enough of a threat to have the hair’s on Lance’s arm rising.

Shiro swung into Keith’s personal space with a deliberate step, reaching out to place one hand on Keith’s bicep the way he had done Lance’s. The stab of disappointment Lance felt at the casualness of it was squashed with a practised definiteness and chased with a habitual curse of his own foolishness; Of course Shiro comforted everyone. He was _ Takashi Shirogane. _He was the Garrison Golden Boy.

Keith looked up at Shiro desperately, his eyes slipping over his friend’s shoulder to land on Lance again. “There has to be some way for us to fix this.”

As a person, Lance felt he was acutely aware of his own shortcomings. He couldn’t admit to liking them, or even believing them endearing, and what he liked even less was for other people to point them out.

So Keith’s suggestion that he needed fixing managed to press on a very particular nerve that caused Lance to retaliate on pure instinct.

“No one needs fixing, thanks,_ Keith, _” Lance snarled his name like an expletive. “Why do you even care, anyway? This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“Do NOT talk to him like that!”

The girl’s voice came razor sharp and loud enough to make Lance jump in the sheets. He only caught a glimpse of Keith’s eyes widening before he turned to face the woman staring him down like a death match she was intent on winning. Lance tried to shoot her a charming smile, but the murderous glint in her eye had it coming out shakier than usual.

“Woah, hey, beautiful. It’s fine, it’s just,” Lance waved vaguely in the other boy’s direction. “Y’know, _ Keith.” _

Even the girl’s scowl was pretty, and the downward tilt of her chin made twin crescents of pink below her eyes sparkle. Lance blinked. He wasn’t sure if he was seeing things correctly given his head injury, but it looked like a pair of scales had made a home on the crest of her cheekbones.

“_ Keith- _” the girl stressed the name pointedly. “-is a Paladin of Voltron and a valued member of this team. You will treat him with respect.”

Lance resisted another urge to roll his eyes, choosing instead to hike his smile up a little higher.

“Fine,” he conceded smugly. “But since I’m being nice, don’t you think I should get something nice in return?

The girl’s furious expression shifted through an entire spectrum of emotions before settling on catastrophic. Her eyes shot over to Shiro and Keith, alight with shock. Someone coughed awkwardly into the resounding silence.

“Dude,” Pidge said flatly. “Stop hitting on Hunk’s girlfriend.”

Lance jaw snapped shut with a click that made his skull vibrate. Slowly, his gaze travelled between Hunk and the beautiful girl standing beside his bed. They were staring uncertainly at each other; Hunk was chewing his lip.

“Holy crow,” Lance breathed in Hunk’s direction as a grin stretched over his face. “Nice job, dude.”

Hunk looked distinctly uncomfortable, but even so he managed to toss a small, fond glance in the girl’s direction.

Lance did the same, shooting her a wink. “Sorry, gorgeous, but dating my best buddy means you’ve officially entered the No Bone Zone. He’s a keeper, by the way.”

The girl opened her mouth to say something in response and promptly shut it.

Hunk just groaned, offering nothing more than a weak, “Seriously, Lance…”

A strange noise came from Lance’s left, and he turned only to be slammed by dual expressions of discontent. Shiro was regarding Lance with a pained face, every feature pinched like he’d tasted something sour. Comparatively, it was a restrained reaction to Keith’s. The boy stared at Lance with a heartbreaking shade of horror, his mouth hanging slightly open as his face crumpled.

Lance frowning in response was the trigger for Keith to twist on his heel and launch himself towards the exit. The double doors of the medbay slid open with a whisper as Keith marched his way between them, the metal of the corridor rattling in the aftermath of his heavy footfalls.

Shiro shot Lance a strained apologetic smile before taking off after Keith with a light trot.

Lance watched them go, his heart sinking with the distinct impression that he’d over stepped a mark he didn’t even know existed in the first place. 

Not that he cared, he told himself firmly. Keith hadn’t wanted anything to do with him when he was at the Garrison, so Lance was only returning the favour and making sure of that fact. Maybe then they could finally share some middle ground; the casual sting of flippancy. He told himself even more firmly that it was fairness and not pettiness that drove his action, in the hope that he might believe it.

“Jeez Louise, what’s his problem?” Lance asked flippantly as the doors hissed shut after Shiro.

Hunk sent Allura a rather despairing look as Coran worried at his moustache with a quiet, “Weeeeell….”

“Wow,” Pidge’s eyebrows were raised along with the impression in her tone. “That’s gotta be a record for the most people you’ve pissed off in thirty ticks.”

Lance blinked, feeling spirited indignation rise to his defence.

“What?! What did I do?”

“You mean aside from hit on Allura in front of Hunk?” Pidge queried. 

Her tone was one thing Lance did remember; there was a lilting sing song quality to it that simultaneously made Lance feel stupid, like he’d missed something huge, and clever, like he was privvy to her plans.

Lance tilted his head towards the white-haired girl as the name fell like a melody from Pidge’s mouth.

“Allura, huh?” he murmured, trying out the name and how it tasted. “Fancy name.”

“That’s Princess Allura, actually,” Coran called over the bed.

Lance felt his mouth form a small ‘O’, and he breathed the sound of it as his eyes widened to take the entire image of Allura in at once. She certainly looked like a princess, with her straight spin and her commanding presence.

“Fancy title,” Lance added, feeling distinctly common in comparison. To ease the pain of his lacking social class, he quickly lifted his chin to address her. “Sorry… For being rude.”

The features of Allura’s face slackened at his words, letting the tautness of her posture unravel with it. The effect made her look younger and gentler, even more so when she shook her head slightly with a wry smile.

“That’s quite alright, Lance. I think we all know you well enough by now to know you never really expect to follow through with those terrible pick up lines.”

Lance frowned; he wasn’t so sure he’d agree with that. His pickup lines were legendary.

“I wouldn’t say all of us,” Hunk muttered snidely.

When his head turned to glance at the doors of the medbay, Lance frowned even harder. 

“Dude. _ What _ are you talking about?”

Pidge snorted, short and sharp. Hunk glared a warning at her, voice dropping as he growled, “Pidge.”

“Well I don’t think your boyfriends appreciated the bad flirting either.”

Lance’s brow unfurled so quickly he thought for a second it may have left his face, ascending somewhere into the ceiling. 

The first time he’d run a simulation with Pidge, she’d rattled off so many terms that he’d never learnt in English that Lance was convinced she was speaking another language entirely. It had taken him several tries, Pidge’s annoyance growing with each time she was asked to repeat herself, on top of several more hours of studying technology communications basics before he was confident he could grasp at least some of the jargon.

But now Lance felt like he was back at day one of simulations. Pidge was saying words but they didn’t make any sense to him.

Slowly, unsure, Lance repeated, “Boy… Friend?”

Pidge’s grin was so thick it swallowed Hunk’s disapproving scowl.

She opened her mouth to smugly, emphatically say her next word.

“Boy_ friends.” _


	2. ... 5...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Hope you're all well and you had amazing Christmases and New Year's! Sorry for not updating sooner - I actually broke my ankle like 2 weeks after I posted the first chapter, and I started a new job, and then I moved house and honestly it was a whole thing. Life is FINALLY settling down a bit so I thought I'd get back to this story!
> 
> Slight change of plans - I was originally gonna do 3 super long chapters, but I don't actually think writing like that is the best way for me to work productively, plus it just leaves a long time between updates for you guys and no one likes that. So I've decided to do shorter chapters with a higher count :D I've renamed the chapters accordingly too!
> 
> Thank you all so much for your comments on the first chapter, it's really nice to know what you guys think of these stories and definitely motivates me to write more :D
> 
> Hope you enjoy the new chapter!

You could hear things a great long way off, far beyond the scope of normal hearing, when the circumstances were right. This was because the body had a way of directing its energy in times of great stress, like those reports of mothers lifting cars off their babies, or siblings moving chunks of buildings to help their family trapped below. This was known as hysterical strength.

What Lance was experiencing was closer to hysterical shock. He could hear the frantic way Hunk’s shirt shifted as he swung round to face Pidge, and the hoarse trip in his voice as he snapped at her.

“Pidge,  _ seriously! _ You think telling him outright was the best idea?!”

Lance could even hear the small hitch in Pidge’s breath that indicated guilt before the defensive knee jerk caught up to her, and she bit back a volatile retort. But beyond that, he could hear the staccato thud of his heart plodding against his eardrums, and the rough slide of his tongue against the roof of his mouth where he swallowed against the sudden dryness. Lance could hear the sandpaper scratch of his fingers as he curled them into a chokehold around his sheets, and distantly wondered when they’d gotten calloused enough to tear fabric.

“He’s  _ fine!  _ Look at him, Hunk, he’s taking it in stride.”

“Look at him? He’s  _ panicking,  _ Pidge!”

“He’s sitting right there…” Allura reminded them dryly.

Lance could even hear Hunk grimace. It was large enough to be audible, but also his neck clicked slightly as his shoulders rose to his ears and he cupped a hand around his mouth. It did little to mask the words that he hissed in Pidge’s direction.

“He’s basically back to how he was at the Garrison. You don’t know what it was like, but I DO. Keith and Shiro were like,  _ a thing,  _ for him.”

The mention of those names was most definitely a thing for Lance, one that had his vocal chords flexing as he tried to force out a compliant word.

“Not,” he croaked.

Four sets of eyes turned to look at him with blanket surprise.

Lance cleared his throat, and the sound of that was high and grating, had him wincing. “They’re not a  _ thing  _ for me. They’re just- They’re… Fuck, they’re Keith and Shiro, y’know?”

Pidge’s grin could only be described as salacious. “Keith and Shiro, who you b-”

“Ah-buh-buh-buh! Stop! Seriously, no,” Lance cut her off with a sharp index finger pointing skywards. Now that the silverale had settled in his stomach, the headache had alleviated enough for him to think clearly. And that clarity bore a list of all the reasons Pidge was incorrect. “I mean first of all,  _ Keith.  _ Are you kidding? Nuh-uh, not a chance. There is just no  _ way  _ that would ever be a thing. I hate that guy.”

The conviction behind the words felt disjointed, even as Lance said them. Keith had a way of burrowing under his skin and squatting there like it was his right. But  _ hate  _ felt like a toxin that Lance had just spat into the air, and his body was rejecting it like a nervous reaction. He moved on swiftly to avoid the paralysis of dwelling on it. 

“And second of all,  _ Shiro??  _ He’s like…”

Lance struggled for the right description. The threat of hope loomed over him like an axe, and Lance was propping it up with a slippery grip, fighting gravity with all his might so that it wouldn’t fall and cut the feeling free. 

“He’s  _ SHIRO.  _ He’s the Garrison golden boy, there’s not a person alive that measures up. There’s no way that we- that we’re... There’s just no WAY!”

Coran was watching him unload with a clinical sort of interest, pinching one end of his moustache over and over as he watched silently. Lance felt like a microbe squirming beneath a microscope.

“C’mon guys,” Lance half laughed, half choked. “I mean… Really? Keith and Shiro?”

“Your boyfriends,” Pidge reminded him.

“They’re  _ NOT! _ ” Lance insisted.

The thought was making him feel too many things at once. If you mix too many colours together, you end up with brown. Mix too many emotions together and Lance was quickly finding out that you end up with gripping nausea. The room went rapidly quiet with his outburst. Hunk and Allura glanced at each other uncertainly, whilst Pidge’s smiled slipped as she surveyed him through those round glinting spectacles, the first tinges of doubt bleeding into the edges of her posture. Coran tugged nervously at his moustache several times before busying himself with Lance’s scans. They seemed incapable of concluding what he meant, so Lance helped them as best he could.

Picking a spot on the sheets to stare at, Lance hung his head as he mumbled, “They… Can’t be.”

Despite his deflection, it was Coran that spoke. “Why ever not?”

There was no measurement for wonder. Distance had yards and metres, time had seconds and minutes, there were two whole scales for weight and temperature. But there was no way for Lance to verbalise the breadth of what he felt about Keith and Shiro.

Keith was a glass ceiling that Lance couldn’t break, he could only describe how heavy the weight of it was, and so he’d vowed to batter himself against it until he felt raw from the effort. Shiro was on a podium so high up that Lance could only describe the marble it was made from and how the height was beyond his reach. So he’d vowed to strive as far as his legs would take him. They were outside his range for wonder, and therefore outside his vocabulary to explain it so.

Simply, without much hope of being understood, he replied, “Because- They’re… Keith and Shiro.”

Though the shock was subsiding, leaving behind a sagging empty feeling that tugged at his bones, Lance could hear how Hunk softened, his shoulders dropping from beside his jaw to settle again as he reached out to pat Lance’s hand. His fingers, too, were calloused.

“A lot can happen in two years, buddy,” Hunk told him gently. “Why don’t we just start from the beginning, okay? One step at a time.”

The warmth of his grasp felt like a beacon, and Lance swam out to the feeling, letting himself be pulled into the rippling tide of safety.

“One step at a time,” he echoed with a weak smile. “Okay. Thanks, Hunk.”

Pidge slipped from her stool, adjusting her glasses in a way so that the light reflecting off them his her eyes.

“I’m gonna go get you something to eat,” she announced. 

Lance watched her go. She looked somehow smaller than she did at the Garrison, her head ducked and her arms tucked into her sides. It was like she was trying to take up as little space as possible, even as she strode purposefully from the medbay. Hunk watched her too, shaking his head with a resigned smile. He looked like he knew what was going on, which Lance found reassuring, because he had absolutely no idea what was going on at all.

“Yep, she probably feels bad,” Hunk explained. “Pidge likes to poke at things to see how fast they tick.”

A random memory slipped behind Lance’s eyes: Pidge ribbing him about a crush, Pidge testing how long it took him to notice she’d hacked his tablet, Pidge letting off a series of combustibles with pyromaniacal delight as Lance got caught between blazes.

He barked out a laugh at the recall. “Now that I do remember.”

Next to them, Allura straightened out the folds in her dress, her hands running down the fabric briskly. The action felt incredibly formal, and Lance wasn’t sure if it was because she was a princess and that’s how she’d been taught to behave, or if it was for his benefit, since they were now essentially strangers.

“I’m going to find Shiro and Keith,” she announced. Her gaze flitted over Lance briefly before it made its way to Hunk. “I’ll see if I can’t… Talk to them.”

The pause in her sentence seemed loaded. Maybe Lance had once known how to read the message hidden in that brief silence, but for now he was left wondering, and all the poorer for it.

Hunk nodded at her as she rounded the end of Lance bed, steadying herself with one hand on Hunk’s broad shoulder as she stooped to press a kiss against his cheek. Hunk patted her hand with his free one, keeping Lance firmly in the grip of his other.

Once she was safely beyond the medbay doors, Lance granted Hunk a genuine smile.

“You guys look good together.”

Hunk chuckled softly, his fingers around Lance’s hand squeezing with the tremor. “Yeah, I’m not really sure how it happened, but I’m a lucky guy.”

“She’s a lucky girl,” Lance retorted.

“They’re both lucky,” Coran piped from the screens.

He approached the vacant spot Allura had left by Lance’s bed before sitting down, tablet in hand. The action looked weighted, and Lance settled into the realisation that this may be the beginning of a long discussion.

“Alright lad, as Hunk said. Let’s start from the beginning.”

****

Coran had told him that as long as Lance was awake, alert, and able to hold a conversation, then he could be suitably “discharged” from the medbay. As it turned out, this translated to Lance being kept on bedrest for another five days (or “movements” as Coran insistently referred to them), until the older Altean felt confident enough that Lance was well enough to be moving around.

Lance found it hard to believe that Coran ever didn’t feel confident enough, but when it came to the subject of his health, it seemed to be a topic of intense scrutiny for the Altean gentleman. There was a part of Lance, the part that fed his ego, that felt flattered he was being kept in such high regard. But there was a bigger, much louder part of him that fed his attention span, and that part was starving enough to snap at Coran for keeping him trapped within the same four walls (or was it six? Seven walls?) for over one hundred hours.

That was not to say that he was isolated during that time. The rest of the group came to visit him often. Hunk always visited bearing some exotic concoction of what were apparently alien foods that Lance had never tasted before. He took one bite of a shiny purple pasty and was quick to announce it his favourite. 

“I know,” Hunk said quicker, before grimacing at the way Lance frowned. “You’ve uh, said that before. A lot of times.”

“Oh,” Lance replied, for lack of anything better to say. It only took one look at Hunk retreating into his neck for Lance to add brightly, “Well I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  _ These-”  _ He brandished the half eaten pastry aggressively. “These are my faves.”

Lance sealed the statement by swallowing the rest of the treat in one bite. He regretted his decision not to chew for as long as it took Hunk to break into a relieved grin, the smile lighting up his entire face like the moon.

Pidge visited with smaller offerings of food sometimes, but more frequently with her tablet cemented to one hand and a movie at the ready. Lance had to admit that alien films were as funny as they were odd. He couldn’t understand why he found a bunch of alien that shared the stature of oversized stick insects and dramatically shouted “BI-BOH” so entertaining, but he laughed hard enough for his stomach to cramp and his eyes to water, and that was apparently sufficient cause for Coran to decide that his health was in mortal danger. Pidge was forbidden from showing Lance any more Bi-Boh-Bi movies until he’d “recovered properly”. The ban was not, however, enough to stop her from sneaking Lance snacks whenever she could. Every time she slid a sealed box of goodies between the sheets around his legs, her amber eyes glinted madly, and Lance felt he understood a little better how she had wound up in space after apparently hacking a camera feed.

Allura’s visits were sweeping and brief. She felt like a small hurricane, rushing through the doors, the whispering of her long gowns elevated by the hiss of the automatic doors. Lance would feel hands on his arms, his neck, brushing warm lines across his forehead and punctuated by sharp questions that weren’t directed at him but concerned him all the same. Coran was ever present, and attentive enough to answer Allura’s quickfire questions about Lance’s status in rapid succession. He’d feel the hands squeeze and look into a pair of iridescent eyes that softened at his dumbfounded expression. Lance would hear a gently murmured word that felt like it finally was directed at him before Allura would whisk away in a ripple of shimmering folds and gossamer hair. The entire experience felt very odd, as if Lance had merely dreamt the princess’s presence, instead of actually experiencing it. It felt like a sad dream, as though he was missing something he wasn’t even aware he’d had in the first place.

Keith did not visit.

Lance was in two minds about this, and each of those minds occupied a different amount of space in his head: The first part greedily stole a generous 90%, and it was loud in it’s conviction that Keith’s absence was a good thing. He didn’t like Lance and Lance didn’t like him, so there was no need for them to spend any more time together to validate this fact. Lance was more than happy to allow this part of his mind to inflate at his frontal cortex and sit there unmoved. 

But the smaller, quieter 10% slipped around it like water, filling up the cracks and rubbing against Lance’s psyche in the few moments that there was nothing else to occupy his attention. It washed in with a feeling of loss that felt foreign to him, and it gave Lance enough pause for Keith’s avoidance to make his throat ache hotly. 

And then Lance would shake his head and the bigger portion of his mind would take over, and he would think that the heat in his throat was righteous competitiveness.

Unlike Keith, Shiro did visit Lance in the medbay.

It was so unexpected that the first time he strode through the doors, Lance inelegantly choked on the soft pudding Hunk had left for him. Shiro’s brow pinched, and in a second he was at Lance’s bedside, concern dripping from his features and one cool prosthetic hand pressed between Lance’s shoulder blades. 

“Woah, steady there, Lance,” he rumbled. And it was a rumble, Lance thought, Shiro’s tone low and sonorous. Lance wondered if this was what earthquakes sounded like. 

He swallowed thickly against the pudding sticking to his soft palette and forced a smile. It felt too much of a struggle to look Shiro directly in the eyes. His stardom was so strong that looking directly at it felt like peering straight at the sun; Lance was blinded, and so he strained a smile firmly at the corner of his sheets.

“-m’okay. Thanks,” he rasped out.

He felt more than saw Shiro bob his head, the movement flitted over his periphery. Shiro’s hand stayed planted on his back, even as the man sank onto the stool by the side of the bed.

“How are you feeling?” Shiro asked gently.

Lance didn’t think there was a word for how he was feeling, really. Embarrassed was the first emotion that came to mind; it wasn’t every day you met your hero and Lance had expertly tried to inhale a spoon in the presence of his. But there was something beyond the heated flare of humiliation, something gentle and fluid. If Lance listened to the feeling for a little while, he could understand that the weight of the hand on his back felt new and familiar all at once, and that Shiro’s voice struck a particular chord that Lance instinctively connotated with safety and tenderness.

What Pidge had said about him and Shiro and Keith surfaced like a corpse from a lake, and Lance jolted at the touch suddenly. Shiro’s hand shrank back, falling neatly into his lap.

“I’m fine,” Lance said plainly, picking at a loose thread on his sheets. He stared at it determinedly, paying attention to the way the material frayed at the tip in a chaotic splay.

Shiro was silent for a moment. When he moved, it was only to release a sigh that seemed to wither him at the core. 

“You’re always ‘fine’ when there’s something wrong,” he told Lance. “When you’re right, you’re better than ‘fine’.”

Lance pinched the thread into fingers and his lips into a line.

“You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to,” Shiro continued, his voice staying steady and warm in that way that made Lance feel safe. “But I’m here if you do.”

As if punctuating his point, the fingers of Shiro’s hand crept their way onto the edge of the bed. It was his organic hand, Lance noted, and staring at the pink pads of his calloused digits made Lance feel warmer still. It was a clear invitation, but Lance did not have the scope to imagine a world where he could take that hand in his. He clutched his sheets more tightly, shielding his hands in the crisp blankets.

“Pidge uh-” Lance stalled, the truth sparking in a false start up his windpipe. “Pidge told me… About, y’know…”

He span the thread in a lethal carousel between his fingertips. “About you and me.”

Lance chanced a peek up at Shiro, hoping his bangs were long enough to make it seem like a trick of the light. He might have gotten away with it, were Shiro not staring at him with an intensity that made Lance shrink further into himself.

Slowly, Shiro said, “And Keith.”

“What?”

“You and me,” Shiro lifted his jaw at an angle that made it look sharper, his entire face seeming more authoritative. “And Keith.”

“Right, right…” Lance minced over the assertion. “I- Is it true?”

He looked back down to his grip around the blankets. Looking Shiro in the eye for too long was dangerous, and bright, and burning like staring at the sun.

Shiro let out another sight that sounded distinctly more sheepish than the first.

“I don’t think Pidge should have told you as soon as you woke up,” Shiro grumbled. “But… Yes, it’s true. The three of us are a couple.”

Lance frowned. “Wouldn’t three people be a throuple?”

Shiro chuckled, the sound of it startling Lance into looking at him sharply.

“Sorry,” Shiro snorted. “It’s just, you said that the first time, too.”

“The first time?” Lance chewed his lip. “How long have we been- How long were we…?”

“Together?” Shiro offered, a wry smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. 

Lance dropped his head quickly. Saying it out loud felt intensely scandalous.

“Almost two years now, I think.”

There was a brief second when Lance thought he must have hit his head again. What Shiro said didn’t sound like anything he could understand, and so his brain was folding the reply over and in on itself, consuming the words one letter at a time.

Finally, he choked out, “Two  _ years?” _

“Give or take,” Shiro said mildly.

“Give or take,” Lance repeated in a hollow echo.

To give would be to admit there was more than two years of a relationship he didn’t remember. To take would mean that regardless of the second, there was at least one year that was solidly under their belt. Lance didn’t feel like either option was satisfactory, because not knowing if it was two years exactly meant that Shiro was comfortable enough in their relationship that he didn’t need to keep track. The idea made Lance’s mouth rather dry, and he clumsily reached for the glass sat on the table next to his bed. 

Shiro met him halfway, and his fingers slipped over Lance’s light as gossamer as together they lifted the glass of water. His fingertips were cool, Lance noted, more so than the glass itself. The drag of Shiro’s thumb over his knuckles pulled Lance’s gaze downwards to see where the black material of Shiro’s prosthetic hand meet the brown of his skin. He pulled the glass away with a small jerk.

“Uh, thanks,” he muttered, bringing the drink to his lips.

If Shiro had noticed his startling, he declined to comment, instead reclining back into his seat as he watched Lance take a long pull of water. His gaze felt like a physical weight, tugging on Lance’s every movement as he tilted his head back to swallow. He felt more than saw Shiro’s steel-coloured eyes track the bob of his throat, and he suppressed a secondary swallow of nerves.

“So um…” he began awkwardly. “What happened to you?”

Shiro frowned at the question until Lance jerked his chin towards the dark prosthetic.

“Ah,” the noise from Shiro’s lips was halting in it’s shortness. “That’s kind of a long story.”

“I’ve got time,” Lance smiled weakly. “Why not just start from the beginning?”

“I can’t, really.” When Lance frowned his turn, Shiro ran the charcoal black fingers of the prosthetic through the shock of white hair covering his forehead. The action revealed lines in his face that Lance couldn’t recall ever seeing in his posters or on TV. It was like he was seeing a chip in the bright ink the Garrison had always painted Shiro in; the underneath was a substance Lance couldn’t name.

“I lost my memories, too,” Shiro explained slowly. “Shortly after I left on the Kerberos mission. I know me and my team were abducted by the Galra, but it’s all a bit blurry after that.”

“The Galra? Those are the bad guys, right?” Lance tried the enemies name in his mouth, pronouncing it the way Pidge had. It rolled off his lips with a clip to his tongue, something rough and foreign. 

Shiro’s smile was dull as he replied, “Right.”

He lifted the prosthetic, reaching it out towards Lance in a gesture that seemed completely automatic, before he stilled, tightened his hand into a fist, and let it drop back into the sheets. His organic hand fidgeted where it sat in his lap, fingers curling restlessly. It was unclear if he had aborted the action because he felt conscious of his prosthetic or because he wasn’t sure if the familiarity was appropriate.

“I guess I just wanted to say…” Shiro lifted his eyes to meet Lance’s steadily. “I understand how scary it is to lose time. But you can trust me, and Keith, and the rest of the team. We’re your family.”

The word was spoken to reverently that Lance had to repeat it, to feel his lips take the shape of it.

He whispered, “My family.” Then, he cried, “My family!”

Shiro’s eyes widened, and he jerked backwards as Lance abruptly sat up straight, staring at him feverishly.

“You said we’ve been in space for two years! Does my family know I’m out here?!”

Lance watched the line of Shiro’s jaw as he opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again, whatever he was trying to say not quite making it past his lips. But the silence said more than Shiro could. Lance felt his throat constrict, strangling his voice as the skin around his eyes began to feel hot. Only his next words had the weight to break through the dam.

“Do they even know I’m alive?”

Shiro’s hand is on him then, without hesitation this time, a warm and gentle grip on his hand.

“We’re working on it,” Shiro said to him, and the promise is rich in his tone. “We’ve been slowly establishing contact with Earth for a while now. We should be able to get a message there any day now.”

‘Any day now’ is a phrase Lance remembered that people say when they don’t know exactly how long it will be. It suddenly mattered very much whether or not it had been give two years or take two years.

There weren’t any more words strong enough to break through the tourniquet of his throat, and so Lance just nodded quietly, keeping his eyes cast down at where Shiro’s thumb rubbed the back of his hand in slow soothing spirals. Neither of them spoke for a while; Shiro’s thumb kept drawing circles into the malleable skin over Lance’s knuckles, Lance waited for his throat to loosen enough for him to swallow down a shuddering inhale.

Eventually, Shiro asked, “Maybe I could tell you a little bit about Voltron?”

Lance nodded again, and managed to croak out and quiet, “Sure.”

The picture Shiro painted as he recounted their team’s history and daring feats seemed like one out of high fantasy. It was exactly the kind of heroic epicness Lance had once dreamed of living; impossibly advanced technology that he got to pilot alongside his hero, universally high stakes, a literal space princess (that was dating his best friend no less). Shiro described each of the lions and their various powers as Lance leant closer, rapt with attention.

It was fitting that Shiro piloted the head of Voltron, Lance thought. He was a natural leader, people had always looked to his strong instincts, piloting skill, and strategic prowess. Lance felt giddy to think that moment ago Shiro had been tenderly tracing the shape of his knuckles with a literal cyborg arm. 

The lightness of it didn’t last as Shiro moved on to detail their roles within Voltron.

“-and Coran handles the castle alongside Allura. It was built by his grandfather, Hieronymus Wimbleton.”

“Jeez, ten thousand six hundred years old and you guys stuck me inside one of those freezing healing pods? I’m surprised I didn’t get stuck in there, how is this thing still running?” Lance breathed out in an incredulous puff.

“Altean technology is really quite incredible,” Shiro grinned. It was a grin that erased any of the fatigue he’d shown earlier. It also made his ears stick out a little farther, and that gave Lance a horrible urge to snort. It died in his throat as Shiro added, “And Keith’s in the Red Lion. It’s the fastest of all of them, so it needs someone who can handle themselves in the field.”

Lance felt a cold swoop in his gut as the words telegraphed. The grandiose tales of Voltron had inflated his heart like a balloon, and with one sentence, Shiro had punctured it, leaving Lance feeling as though the air was being drained out of him at an uncomfortably rapid pace.

“Keith gets the fastest lion?” he asked dubiously. “Seriously?”

Shiro’s grin deflated as well. The look he fixed Lance with was knowing and weighted.    
“Each of us is an integral part of this team, Lance. We all have our role.”

“Uh huh,” Lance grunted. “Soooooo what’s my role, exactly?”

Shiro’s chin tilted up, his tone turning pointed as he replied, “You look out for us. You make sure everyone’s getting enough rest and food, and you care a lot about the team. You keep us together, Lance.”

“Like a nanny?” 

Shiro's gentle warm expression tore into some flickering panic as the words left Lance's mouth. It was an expression Lance had never seen on him before, and a spike of echoing worry licked at his heart.

Shiro opened his mouth, agape at first, before narrowing as he began, "Lance, that's not-"

"It's cool," Lance cut him off. He wasn't sure he could quite bear hearing his idol trying to justify Lance's so called 'place' on the team. The smile that stretched his face warped his voice into a strained reediness. "I'm happy to help where I can. I'm good with people."

Shiro opened his mouth to say more when Hulk bounded into the medbay, arms stacked with the usual feast he prepared for Lance's lunch time.

"Oh good, you're awake!" he cried with a grin. 

It only took him another leap forward to taste the atmosphere of the room, and Hunk's trajectory stalled somewhat, his beatific smile shuttering.

"Uuuh, did I interrupt something?"

"No, you’re finel," Lance said abruptly, not daring to glance in Shiro's direction. "Is that food?"

Maybe it was selfish, but Lance and Hunk knew each other well enough to pick up on one another's tells. And Lance didn't think Shiro was the type of person to force a conversation when he was being frozen out, but then again, Lance apparently knew Shiro better than well enough to hazard a guess, he just couldn't remember. So though it was awkward and bumpy, Hunk dutifully laid an abundant tray of treats over Lance's lap as Shiro quietly excused himself from the room.

Hunk watched him go thoughtfully, his face smooth and neutral right up to the second the medbay doors hissed shut. He rounded on Lance the second following.

"What was that about?"

"What?" Lance blurted elegantly. It was a frail tactic; feigned ignorance would only win him a few seconds before Hunk pushed him headfirst into a conversation he didn't want to have.

"Don't 'what' me, Espinosa. You've had that fake smile on your face all week when it comes to Keith and Shiro."

Lance pressed a hand to his chest with the appropriate amount of dramatic offense. "Excuse you, I'm cute even when I'm faking a smile."

"So you are faking it then," Hunk confirmed.

Lance bit the inside of his cheek, cornered.

"It's really nothing," he mused. "Shiro was just telling me a bit about Voltron and what we do as a team."

It was technically the truth, if the truth could be spun into something flashy and distracting. Hunk didn't seem impressed with the gleam of Lance's words, but there was an understanding in his posture that seemed forgiving of the attempt at omission. Maybe it was another slice of selfishness that made Lance hope his best friend would let things slide due to the severity of his injury.

"Fine," Hunk finally conceded. "But I'm here if you wanna talk about stuff, okay?"

Lance barely concealed his sigh of relief. "I know," he breathed. "Thanks, Hunk."

Hunk just nodded firmly, once, before shoving a slice of some strange dough into Lance's face.

"Good. Eat this."

Lance’s mouth accepted the food before really acknowledging it, opening just wide enough for Hunk to press the squashy substance between his jaws. He wasn’t ungrateful, however, as his stomach gurgled happily whilst he chewed. Talking with Shiro had left him sitting with a strange hollowness below his sternum, and though Lance wasn’t confident it could be filled with food, a full belly was a close enough substitute to distract him from the sensation that gnawed at him.

“So,” Lance started around another mouthful of dough. “Shiro said you were in the yellow lion, toughest of the lot.” He slapped a hand delightfully against one of Hunk’s broad shoulders. “That’s my guy!”

Hunk grinned at him the way he used to when they were kids comparing new toys. “Yeah, Yellow’s a big old boy. Kinda slow but he’s got the armour to make up for it. Means I can take the hits for you when I need to.”

Lance frowned at that. He wasn’t so much upset with the thought of Hunk protecting him as he was at the thought that they had to protect each other at all. War seemed like an abstract concept for him, a word that was tangled up with thin notions of loss and trauma, but didn’t actually hold any tangible sense for him. 

“You shouldn’t take hits for us, buddy.”

“That’s what we do, man,” Hunk replied airily whilst he straightened Lance’s tray, as if it wasn’t a discussion at all and merely a fact. “We’re a team, we watch each others’ backs.”

“Well that explains why everyone’s been checking up on me so much.”

Lance leaned back onto his pillows. His tongue would have leaned back in his mouth, too, were he finished speaking. But instead, it jumped behind his teeth, eager to spit out the words, “Everyone but Keith.”

Hunk stilled in his fussing with the tray, eyes sliding over to look sidelong at Lance. It was a familiar look that Lance mirrored whenever something sly and crooked slipped between them, unsaid.

“Keith hasn’t come to see you?” Hunk queried lightly. Though it was a forced lightness, his tone was too pumped with hot air for Lance not to look up at it.

He flattened his own voice in response as he said, “Not that I care.”

Hunk nodded in that same casual fashion. “Didn’t say you did care, buddy.” Then, in time with that sly and crooked look, he added, “Keith cares about  _ you _ , though.”

Lance’s face warped as he wrinkled his nose and stopped halfway. The response was automatic, but it somehow felt foreign, not quite in the right place. He allowed his features to flatten just like his voice to avoid further conflict.

“Keith only cares enough about me to make sure he’s one-upping me.  _ All. The time. _ ”

“I don’t know about you,” Hunk’s voice joined in on the slyness of his expression. “But that sounds like someone who wants your attention.”

Lance felt a match strike against his heart, bright and warm, and the heat filled his cheeks like a bonfire. He spluttered an indignant string of something that could have been words, had he not been too distracted to finish pronouncing each one. Instead, he only succeeded in coughing out a colourful assortment of noises that fed Hunk’s smirk.

“Yeah  _ well! _ Keith-” Lance tripped over the name like it was too big for his mouth to hold, a feeling that stoked the hearth of his ire. “He only wants me to notice him so he can rub all his perfect simulation scores in my face like the big  _ jerk _ he is!”

The look Hunk gave him made Lance feel abruptly three feet shorter and ten years younger. Being cut down to size so immediately rendered him rather speechless, and so Lance had to sit in the swampy aftermath of his outburst as Hunk drawled at him.

“Feel better?”

“Shut up,” Lance grumbled.

Despite knowing it would make him look as childish as he felt, Lance crossed his arms firmly over his chest. It was the best way to defend his heart, after all. Hunk sighed, standing up to perch one round butt cheek on the edge of Lance’s mattress. It was the exact thing he did at the Garrison when Lance was behaving tiresomely irate about something, and had come to be known by Lance as a indicator of when Hunk was about to drop either some shining truth he didn’t want to hear or some sound advice he didn’t care to take.

“Look,” Hunk started, with the same finality he always did. “Why don’t you just talk to him? AndI mean  _ talk,  _ Lance-” Hunk raised one finger sternly as Lance opened his mouth automatically to argue. “Don’t just jump down his throat like you always do. And quit trying to pick a fight with him! We’ve all got enough to deal with without you bullying Keith into an argument he doesn’t want to have.”

The use of the word ‘bullying’ hinged Lance’s jaw closed with the slowness of a rusty trap. It wasn’t a thought he’d ever applied to himself, but now it had been spoken out loud, he couldn’t help but look back at every interaction he’d had with Keith through the filter of antagonism.

He didn’t particularly like what he saw through this light; that each tempestuous argument had been instigated, if not aggressively encouraged, by Lance. It was the exact truth Lance hadn’t wanted to hear, but it was the one that Hunk had provided accordingly.

Hunk’s hand on his shoulder felt like a lighthouse at sea, and Lance let himself be pulled into it, grateful for his friend’s attunement with his emotions.

“Just quit baiting him,” Hunk punctually offered his sound advice as a balm to the sting of truth. “You might be surprised to find you two actually have a lot in common.”

“Sure,” Lance snorted. “When hell freezes over.”

Hunk shot him a look that had Lance raising his hands in defence.

“Okay, okay! Jeez Louise, Hunk, I’ll  _ try.  _ No promises though.”

“That’s good enough for me,” Hunk said, but in a defeated way, not in a confident sort of way. “So how are you feeling anyway? Has anything come back to you yet?”

Lance shook his head as he chewed on a slice of shiny, plastic looking fruit. The name of it escaped him, and he wasn’t certain his vocal chords were built to pronounce it anyway. All he knew was that it tasted like Lance couldn’t describe, but the mechanical hinge of his jaw seemed to recognise the consistency where his taste memory failed him.

“Not really,” he replied around another slice. “I get random flashes sometimes. Little things, like stuff that I feel like I’ve done before, I just can’t remember doing them.”

Hunk nodded sagely. In a uncharacteristic display of restraint, he opted to stay silent, letting his own jaw work as Lance gobbled away at the food. But knowing each other’s quirks and tells was a two way street, and so Lance relinquished his hands from the bowl of fruit to wrap Hunk fingers in his own.

“Hey man, don’t look so blue. I’ll get my memory back, it just might take some time, okay?”

Hunk gave him a smile that stretched outwards instead of upwards, the expression not quite hitting his eyes.

“Yeah buddy, I know.”

The words were more solemn than their meaning. Lance could feel something hiding behind them, something that Hunk wasn’t saying, and it suddenly struck him how far apart a two year memory loss had placed them. There was clearly something Hunk wasn’t saying, but Lance only had the tell and none of the context. He felt woefully unequipped to offer comfort under the circumstances.

“You should get some rest; I think Coran’s finally letting you out the med cage tomorrow.”

Lance perked right up, his worries swept away like cobwebs with the fresh distraction.

“He is?”

“Yeah, so we can show you around the castle! It’s pretty big, and you’ll probably find a weird room or five. But everyone’s taking turns showing you round one section so you won’t get lost.”

Lance’s excitement snagged on a word halfway through the sentence. “Everyone?”

“Yes, Lance, Keith too,” Hunk drawled. He pushed the tip of one stern finger into Lance’s nose, “Be nice.”

Lance swatted his hand away with a mock cry, rubbing his nose dramatically. “I’m  _ always  _ nice, Hunk.”

“Then prove it,” Hunk shot him a challenging stare. “Don’t be a dick to Keith.”

“I’ll have you know that a healthy dose of competition is good for morale.”

“Sure.”

“It’s science.”

“Whatever you say, Lance,” Hunk brushed him off with one final dismissive wave as he collected the remains left of the tray and started towards the exit, not even pausing to look back as he said. “Go sleep.”

He punctuated his point by slapping a button by the door, plunging the room into darkness. Lance huffed and wrapped the covers around himself, grumbling into the sheets for as long as it took him to realise that he was muttering at nothing more than a dark empty room. He squashed a pillow over his head from embarrassment, but again, only for as long as it took him to realise that he had no one to hide his embarrassment from. Lance removed the pillow from his head and rolled onto his back, letting sleep simply come to him.

His dreams were deep and textured, a brilliant assortment of sensory collection that he could experience fleetingly but could somehow not retain. It was as though he could move through them as a concept, reaching up to run his hands through the senses like weaving his fingers through the thread work of a tapestry. This brought forth a new sensation; a roughness against his skin that encapsulated his hand in warmth. Lance stretched towards it with his mind as he hovered at the gate between rest and waking. Physically, his fingers strained to hold onto it, curling eagerly to hook the feeling into their possession. The feeling squeezed back, just as eager to be caught. It was the feeling of a thumb brushing over his knuckles that lead Lance over the threshold of consciousness, a feeling he’d felt before. 

_ Shiro?  _ His mind supplied, and his mouth outlined the shape of the name.

This was similar, yes, but Shiro’s fingers were thick, his hands broader. These fingers were slimmer, and calloused to the precipice of leather. He cracked his eyes open a sliver, and was pleased to find the lights were still down, filling the room with a watery dimness that dulled the edges of everything in it. Still, Lance’s eyes wandered down to where his hand lay cradled in the familiar grip, squeezing his own hold tighter instinctively. There was a clear map plotted from where the connection was made. Lance only had to follow it up the arm that was reaching out to grasp him to see a figure slumped down in the seat next to his bed.

The low light made the figure’s pale skin blend into the white of his collar, the choppy black locks atop his head feathering out into the shadow of the room. The flashy colours of his flight jacket had been bled out into simple values of dark and light, and the fabric rose and fell like a tide with his steady breathing.

Lance’s hand jerked as he registered who it was. The fingers locked around his tightened evermore, and the figure shifted dissatisfied in his rest. The ration of illumination that had been afforded by the dim lighting wiped a gleam across the figure’s eyes as he blinked them open, and the two of them locked gazes immediately. 

The silence stretched from a second, to two, then five, and beyond. But Lance stirred a ripple in the pool as he parted his lips to breath one name.

“Keith.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Find me on Tumblr! ](http://boscribbles.tumblr.com/)   



	3. ... 4 ...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance gets reacquainted with the castle, his friends, and his.... Other friends...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hidey ho good people, hope you're all doing well and keeping safe! How's quarantine treating everybody? I hope you're all taking precautions and staying inside. These are trying times and we have to protect each other <3
> 
> I think this is the fastest I've ever updated anything. That being said, remember how I mentioned I'd be doing shorter chapters for more frequent posting? Yeah, me neither, good thing I never said that... Little bit more plot heavy this chapter, so there'll be more character interaction in the next one. It's good to stagger, yeah?
> 
> Wanna say a massive thank you to everyone who posts comments, they're the most gratifying thing you can receive as a writer, and I'm happy you're all enjoying the story so far. And a huge thank you to [salineshots ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/salineshots/pseuds/salineshots)  
for beta reading this chapter. If you haven't checked out her work, she's writing an awesome shklance soulmate au right now so be sure to give it a read!!
> 
> A quick reminder - Please please don't stay up to read this chapter. Don't skip schoolwork/coursework/homework/ANY work to read. Sit up, hydrate, make sure you've eaten something. The story isn't going anywhere, it'll be here when you've looked after yourself first <33
> 
> Happy reading everyone! xxx

Keith’s name was something sweet over Lance’s tongue, rolling over his lips like it lived in his lungs and he’d breathed it into waking. The gentle haze of sleep still muffled his mind, and so it was pure muscle memory that had Lance dragging Keith’s hand clasped in his closer, so that he could press his lips against the peaks of the other boy’s knuckles. Where his sluggish sensory recall had told him to expect chapped leather, instead Keith’s skin was soft, gliding with resonant friction against Lance’s mouth.

_ “Lance....”  _

His name was gasped like a wonderous thing, and Lance blinked his eyes a little wider to see Keith hovering out of his seat, poised like a predator about to pounce. Lance looked up into two pairs of violet irises, inky and dark with the dim of the room, and something furious and hungry licked at his heart. The sensation was fleeting, but it was overwhelming enough to shock Lance out of the fog of slumber. 

He snatched his hand away like it had branded him and buried it against the recoiling curve of his body. Ripples of bedsheets twisted around his legs as he scrambled backwards with enough force to knock his spine unhappily against the bed frame.

“Keith!” 

This time the name came out sharp and harsh as a clap. The contrast to how it felt when he’d breathed it was corrosive, and something miserable and sore rose in his throat.

Keith was wearing an emotion Lance had never seen on him before. It was a terrible and specific shade of fear that Lance couldn’t detect the nuance of, the darkness of the room seeping into the finer lines of his face to cut out his expression in stark definition. He remained poised, weight rocking on the balls of his feet, but his posture twitched like he was about to bolt.

They stared at each other for one looming moment of dreadful uncertainty. Lance felt heat rise in his cheeks as it bled from his lips and his hand.

“What are you doing?” he demanded, and was devastated to find his voice erupt as something of a squawk.

“I-” The first word was a reflex, popping out of Keith’s mouth in automatic response to a question. He stilled as he continued to survey Lance coiled against the bed frame, jaw working as it tested out the shape of several responses. 

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he settled on.

Lance blinked. “You didn’t.”

Keith relaxed a little. Not enough to loosen his pose, but enough to drop where his arms had been held like a wax work, reaching towards Lance.

“Are you okay?” he murmured, voice softer than the dark they sat in. “How are you feeling?”

Startled was a word that came to mind, mildly terrified was another. Neither seemed to quite fit what Keith was asking, though, so Lance said, “Fine. I feel fine.”

This answer didn’t seem an adequate fit for Keith’s question either, as the other boy pursed his lips, shooting Lance a wary glare.

“You’re always ‘fine’ when there’s something wrong. When you’re right, you’re better than ‘fine’,” Keith’s voice dropped almost to a growl. “So tell me how you really are.”

Lance blinked. Keith made it sound like an accusation, and Lance’s pride demanded instinctively that his hackles raise. When Shiro had said it-

Lance coughed suddenly, the parallel getting jammed in his windpipe.

Keith blinked at him, all the threat slipping from the pinch in his brow. “What?”

“Nothing, nothing, it’s just…” Lance shifted uncomfortably, his legs still wound tight in the sheets. “Shiro said the exact same thing.”

Keith’s expression flattened out into something smooth and stunned. He looked like a different version of himself, one that was smaller and quieter and newer. A New Keith.

“Well,” he started awkwardly. “Yeah.”

Lance scoffed. “Yeah? That’s it?”

The other boy scowled fiercely, and the Old Keith was back. “ _ Yeah,  _ ‘yeah’. What else do you want me to say?”

“I dunno! Something more illuminating than that?!”

Keith’s nose wrinkled as he spat out, “Well I’m  _ sorry  _ that I don’t know what else to say.”

And then, as if to punctuate his point, Keith’s chin jutted out. Not much, no more than a centimeter, but it was enough for Lance to notice in the dark. And he could recognise a pout when he saw one, he’d practically invented sulking. This looked like both Old Keith and New Keith simultaneously.

Lance made an inelegant snorting noise, “Oh my god.”

Keith arched one dark brow in question.    
Lance swiftly elaborated, “You are a complete moron.”

Keith looked very familiar then. He was wearing a simmering expression that Lance had only seen in flight class when Iverson had yelled at him for showing off and pulling risky maneuvers. It was the sharp downward tilt of the corners of his mouth paired with a pallid glare and dangerous glinting in his eyes. It meant that he was either going to seethe in silence, or he was two seconds away from snapping. 

But Keith did something unfamiliar next: He looked away sharply, all the fight dropping out of the stiff set of his shoulders.

“So do you remember anything yet?” he asked bluntly.

Lance had been anticipating two things - the heat of an argument was a familiar fire, one he knew how to stoke into a keen and hungry flame. The icy sting of silent treatment was a winter he could weather with his own brand of cold shoulder.

Being doused in lukewarm interest and an attentively moderated temperament was arguably more offensive than either extreme. 

Unfortunately, because Lance was expecting one of two options, and not a surprise third, he could only respond with one of two emotions. So it really wasn’t his fault when he opened his mouth and heated words came over his tongue in a rolling boil.

“ _ No,  _ Keith. I can’t just switch my brain off and on again and hope all the files restore themselves.”

Keith’s jaw shut with a click but his teeth stayed out, shining sharply in the halflight. His response was less feral than Lance was expecting too, and Keith’s eyes dropped to his calloused fingers as he mumbled quietly, “I was just asking.”

Lance studied Keith’s hands. They were stripped bare of the usual cracked leather gloves Lance was so used to seeing him in. Usually his mind would paint the image of them over the top of the image his eyes were feeding him, but there was a strange allure to seeing Keith’s fingers without the encasing garment. His hands looked smaller, despite being square and strong. Softer despite the worn skin on the underside of his knuckles. It was his palms, Lance realised, that looked soft and preserved. He had only begun to imagine what they felt like when something slipped alongside his psyche like a breath. Another reverie, not the same as the first but aligned with it, that had Lance seeing his fingers slip into the circle of Keith’s to press curiously against those palms. 

His hand was already lifting to realise this fantasy when Lance caught it and tucked it neatly back into his lap. Not having control over his memory was one thing, but losing his bodily autonomy felt frightening to a new and dangerous degree.

As if to drive home this point, his lips moved to mutter a limp, “Sorry.”

Keith looked up from his hands. Lance promptly looked down at his own.

“Hunk told me not to be a dick to you,” he hastened to add. “And if my best bud likes you then you can’t be all bad. So, I’m giving you a chance.”

“A chance?” Keith leant back in his chair in a way that reminded Lance of why he’d hated him so much to begin with. “Wow, thanks.”

“Strike one, Keith,” Lance shot him a warning look.

Keith leaned forward in his chair again, but this time in a way that made him look more tired and older than he was.

“Can we not fight?” The question felt weighty, and the atmosphere was already fragile in the stunted light of the room. Not quite light, not quite dark, just a tenuous limbo between the two. “I hate fighting with you.”

When Lance breathed a reply, it was like pulling a block from a jenga tower. He didn’t want the whole thing to come tumbling down.

“So don’t fight with me.”

Keith looked up at him, dark eyes glinting at him wickedly from under even darker hair. His smile cut his face.

“ _ You  _ don’t fight with  _ me.”  _

It was a disruptive grin, Lance thought. It ruined their perfect pendulum rhythm of push and push back. Lance prodded, Keith snapped, Lance recoiled and Keith calmed. Rinse, repeat. And now Keith was smiling at him like he’d worked out the game. Lance was left with nothing to do but conclude that it wasn’t fun anymore and so here they were. Not quite friends, not quite rivals.

“Deal,” he said bluntly.

Keith nodded sharply in agreement. “Deal.”

****

It had taken a long while for Lance to fall asleep after that.

Keith had muttered something listless and incomplete before disappearing from the medbay to sleep. Lance had rolled over in his sheets, stared at the wall, and thought about how the feeling of Keith’s hand in his had made a marvel of his nerve endings.

He’d stared at his palm for a measure of time he wouldn’t admit to. It had been far longer than the first few minutes he’d held his hand inches from his face, when it had become apparent that neither the intensity of his gaze, nor the lack of lighting would not yield much result.

When he’d woken, Lance had found himself in the same position as the night before, his cheek and the corner of one eye crumpled against the pillow. His hand had lain stretched out in front of him, reaching. Lance had balled it into a fist and stuffed it under the covers as penance for its betrayal.

Now, he sat perched upright as a parrot whilst Coran stuck an alarming number of tools under his tongue, in his ears, and up his nose.

“Vitals are good, no lingering contusions or swelling, responsive to light,” Coran rattled off loud as a ringmaster.

When Lance smacked away the latest offensive utensil, Coran waggled his gloved fingers under Lance’s nose.

“How many fingers?”

“Uh, five,” Lance muttered, and nearly gave himself whiplash as he recoiled from Coran’s face suddenly appearing very close to his own.

The man sneered unhappily, “That’s four fingers and  _ a thumb,  _ young man. Details are important!”

“I think Lance is more than okay to be discharged, Coran.”

Lance looked over to see Shiro leaning against the doorframe, the prosthetic arm propped up against the jam to support himself. With his grey form fitting shirt and crooked grin worn as a matching set, he looked like something out of a calendar, Lance thought. And his eyes settled firmly on Lance, like he was in on the joke.

Lance felt a phantom urge to grin back, something like a reflex echoing around the muscles of his face. Instead, he offered a lame little wave.

“Hey, Shiro, g’morning. Come to check up on me?”

Shiro pushed off the door, making his way purposefully towards where Lance sat. “Yes, actually.”

He stopped much closer than seemed necessary; Lance could feel the warmth radiating off his skin where he’d placed his hand on the bench.

“Allura said Coran was finally going to release you today. How’re you fe-”

“Oh my god,” Lance groaned. “If one more person asks me how I’m feeling, I’m just gonna go ahead and give myself another concussion.”

He punctuated this remark with an emphatic roll of his eyes, and a punch to Shiro’s shoulder.

Coran paused. Lance froze, and slowly looked up to see Shiro blinking at him, his face awash with surprise.

“Uh-”

Babbling was Lance’s speciality. And like all of his specialities, it failed him at the most critical of moments. “I’m sor-”

But then Shiro threw back his head and released an enormous bark of laughter, “Alright, tough guy, guess you didn’t lose that sense of humour along with your memories.”

And his smile was wide enough that it stretched right over Lance, infecting him. Lance grinned back, albeit sheepishly.

“Coran,” Shiro directed his attention with a turn of his head that made his jugular pop a pretty line up to the cut of his jaw. “Can we finally have our Lance back?”

_ Our  _ Lance. It sounded heavenly because a part of Lance had always craved to belong to someone, and now a part of Shiro was claiming him.

Coran was tipped nearly completely upside down as he fished in the base of some random medical crate. Only his backside poked out the top, making for rather impolite conversation.

“Just one more test,” his backside told them with a wiggle.  _ “Catch!” _

Lance’s head whipped around faster than his conscious thought at the shout. His hands had whipped around faster, it seemed, and Lance struck something out of the air without even really seeing it to begin with. The medical tool tray Coran had lobbed at him cracked a cacophony around the room as it bounced off the wall. It settled into a corner of the room, rattling indignantly.

“Well, I should say his reflexes are back up to scratch,” Coran chimed, fortunately from his face this time, and not his rump.

Shiro turned from the tray to look at Lance wide-eyed as he murmured, “You just hit that without even looking at it.”

“And armed!” Coran supplied cheerfully.

“What?” Lance frowned. Coran nodded to his hand, and he looked down to see his hand white knuckled around a reflex hammer. “Oh.”

He couldn’t remember snatching it off the trolley, but he assumed that was where it had come from, and he gingerly dropped it back onto the stand. A cool touch found its way to the back of his neck and squeezed gently.

“That’s my guy,” Shiro grinned at him. 

Lance flushed.  _ Our  _ had felt belonging.  _ My  _ felt possessive, and the careful grip on his neck was bordering on adhesive.

“Coran,” Shiro looked up from Lance. Lance could not bring himself to look up from Shiro.

“Yes yes, he can go,” Coran sighed heavily. “But we must all be keeping an eye on him!”

He wagged one grumpy finger in Shiro’s direction. Shiro didn’t seem like the type of guy to be wagged at, but he played it off well with a friendly wave and a firm grip scooping its hold around Lance’s shoulder. Together, the two of them marched from the medbay and out into the hallway.

Shiro relinquished his grip as the doors hissed closed behind them, but he walked close enough for their sleeves to brush every third step.

Normally the close contact would have driven Lance to agitation, but there was something familiar about it, something that fed anticipation until it became a rhythm. 

Step, step, brush.

“So, I know you told me not to ask you how you were feeling,” Shiro began, eyes turning on Lance. “But… How are you really feeling? Are you feeling-” he tipped one prosthetic finger upwards, the gesture somewhat aborted, “anything?”

Lance was most definitely feeling something; the static charge from Shiro’s shirt brushing teasingly over his skin, but that didn’t seem like the correct answer to the question.

“No, no memories back yet,” Lance told him.

Shiro hummed, turning his eyes front again. It was impossible to tell if he was disappointed without looking at him, but to do so felt incriminating, so Lance turned his focus instead to the flow of their walk. Step, step, brush.

It was a second before he thought to tack on, “Sorry.”

“God, Lance,  _ no. _ ”

There was that grip again, this time looping a full circle around his elbow. It wasn’t quite enough to halt him in his tracks, but the look in Shiro’s eyes was. It was the least composed Lance had ever seen him. That was to say, the most Lance had ever really seen of him to begin with was Garrison recruitment posters, press releases, and the cool authority he carried with him during every piloting class. To see him staring at Lance with hard worry and disquiet lining his features was so far out of character that Lance had to pause to get a better look at it.

“You don’t need to apologise for not remembering yet. It’s only been a few days, these things take time.”

The hard stare waned into something more malleable and warm. “No one’s mad at you. It’s not your fault.”

Lance felt his mouth twist with the truth. “It kind of is though.”

“What are you talking about?” Shiro’s hand still cuffed Lance’s arm, and Lance looked down at it for a safer alternative than that look once again. 

“Coran told me when I woke up that I got hit by some alien… bug? Thing? He said that I was distracting it for you guys.”   
‘You guys’ meaning Shiro and Keith, but Lance didn’t think he could say that part out loud just yet. Of all the things on the ship, it felt the most alien.

“A gwyllian warmonger,” Shiro nodded. His grip tightened just so. “And you were distracting it so that me and Keith could get a shot at it.”

“Yeah,” Lance gulped. “So it is kind of my fault. And I get it if you’re mad.”

Shiro tipped his head to the side. From Lance’s perspective, it made his ears stick out at a rather alarming angle. 

“Well… Yeah, okay, I am kind of mad about that,” Shiro admitted. Lance’s shoulders dropped heavily. “But not for the reason you might think.”

When Lance still didn’t look up, Shiro shook the arm he still held a little to get his attention. Just a little tug, it was almost polite, the way Lance remembered him from TV. 

“I never want you to put yourself in unnecessary danger like that again,” he said firmly, and there was that cool authority Lance remembered from the Garrison, too.

“I’m sorry about that,” Lance mumbled.

“It was a really stupid thing to do.”

“Sorry,” Lance mumbled, quieter this time. More sheepish.

Shiro was still staring at him, an unhappy coil making a home at the corner of his mouth. He lifted his free hand purposefully to set it upon Lance’s cheek as he leaned forward. The tips of his prosthetic fingers grazed oh so carefully over Lance’s temple, the pad of his thumb skimming the cheekbone.

“It hit you so  _ hard,  _ Lance,” Shiro whispered. His voice had dropped to something Lance didn’t remember at all. “I don’t know what I would’ve done…”

And it wasn’t the sound of his voice, but Lance did remember something. There was a magnetism to their closeness, like two planets in orbit. A freefall Lance didn’t want to resist. It was only by stealing a brief glance at Shiro’s lips, almost perfectly in his eyeline, did he realise how close they were standing.

“U-um,” his voice cracked a fissure in the atmosphere, and all of the gathered polarity suddenly evaporated, leaving him tumbling backwards in harsh gravity.

Shiro’s hands vanished from Lance’s face and arm, leaving him cold and tingling. He didn’t resume walking down the hall, but he very much looked like he wanted to, and so Lance took a merciful first step back onto their route. There was a deliberate space between their arms this time; step, step, step…

“So, “ Shiro started, without looking at him, “We thought that we could start by giving you a tour of the castle, help you get your bearings so you’re not flying blind around this place.”

He spoke exactly the way Lance knew him to be: distinguished, authoritative, and very very far away from Lance’s reach.

“Oh, yeah, cool!” Lance feigned enthusiasm with the finesse of a seasoned fraudster. “Huge ancient alien spaceship, there’s gotta be loads of stuff to check out around here.”

Shiro turned to smile at him, tight and professional. It made Lance feel like less of a teammate and more of a fan, which was an odd sensation since he had been a fan of Shiro’s for so long. Seeing him on the big screen had been inspiring enough to sign Lance’s name on the dotted line of military school. Listening to him talking class had been rousing enough to captivate Lance’s attention.

And now Lance knew the exact weight of Shiro’s hand as it cupped his jaw, and abruptly a mild smile didn’t feel like enough.

They were saved the awkwardness of silence by a pair of voices rounding the corner a few moments before their owners came into view. The topic of conversation was shielded by the reverb that the high ceilings in the hallway facilitated, but Lance could take a stab at it when Keith rounded the corner, eyebrows folded low over his dark eyes and his hands jammed stubbornly into the cross of his arms. A small shock of mousy brown hair bobbed next to him, one hand gesticulating pointedly whilst the other clutched a tablet.

She sounded rather weary as she hissed, “I’m just saying, he’s not gonna-”

“Lance,” Keith’s chin struck upwards sharply as he noticed Lance and Shiro approaching down the hallway. Those dark eyes flitted between them with a furious glitter as he uncrossed his arms.

Lance watched Keith’s hands fall by his sides; his gloves were back on, but that didn’t stop Lance from tracing the bowl of Keith’s palm with his gaze. He could feel the map of it underneath his fingers.

“Keith,” Shiro called, a smile ready in his voice. “Pidge. How’s it going?”

Pidge glanced warningly at Keith, even going so far as to take a half step in front of him as she replied, “Great, thanks Shiro.”

She cast her gaze over Lance, and her eyes widened towards the brim of her glasses as she took in the sight of him.

“Lance! Coran finally let you out?”

“For now at least,” Lance grinned back at her. “Seriously, that guy is crazy. He might be hiding around a corner just waiting to drag me back any second.”

Pidge opened her mouth, seemingly to protest, until she stilled and leaned to peer around Lance and Shiro.

“Wouldn’t put it past him,”she muttered. It sounded like it should be a joke, but she narrowed her eyes enough that Lance felt the urge to check behind himself as well.

“Still, it’s great you’re back,” Pidge continued, ignorant to his paranoia.

She stretched open her arms to hug him. Lance mirrored the action; he remembered very well that he liked hugs.

He also remembered quickly what it was like to be punched in the gut, as Pidge clocked a surprisingly hard hook to his abdomen. Lance doubled over, the wind leaving him in one large gust.

“Pidge!” Shiro barked.

“Don’t  _ ever  _ do something like that again,” Pidge wagged a finger in Lance’s face, since apparently he was exactly the type of guy to be wagged at. 

He nodded gasping, still clutching his bruised stomach. Pidge gave him a satisfactory nod, but was otherwise completely indifferent to his suffering.

When Lance straightened up, Keith wasa full step closer than he had been before. His hands were curled like he was waiting to strike, and his eyes sat sharply over where Pidge had hit him.

He only looked away when he caught Lance staring, somewhere off towards the corner of the hallway.

Shiro, ever the diplomat, rested one hand on Lance’s shoulder, the weight of it practised and careful.

“Well, I was hoping that you would take Lance on a tour of the castle’s facilities, but now I’m worried for his safety.”

Pidge waved the tablet in such a cavalier manner, Lance feared she would drop it from simply not caring, “Oh c’mon, Shiro, I only threatened to lock him in the simulation room that one time. And it was a joke, mostly!”

“Pidge.”

The name had fallen from Keith’s mouth, and Lance looked to him instinctively.

He was staring very deliberately at Pidge, which meant he was very deliberately NOT staring at Lance. The smaller paladin glared back at him flatly. For a moment they were at a stalemate, neither one of them gaining ground until Pidge emitted a clipped sight and pushed her glasses quite haughtily up her nose.

“Fine, but I’m not responsible if he breaks anything!”

“You are responsible if he gets broken,” Shiro told her firmly, patting Lance once on the back.

Pidge muttered loud enough to hear, “That counts as breaking something,” but she still plucked Lance’s wrist from his side and began towing him away.

“Have fun, Lance!” Shiro called out as they rounded the corner. “We’ll see you guys at lunch!”

Lance stuck to a safe wave as Pidge dragged him deeper into the halls. Keith didn’t offer any farewell, or even a cursory glance over his shoulder. Lance only saw him move when Shiro took his hand and laced their fingers together, leaning forwards as if to press a kiss to the smaller man’s cheek.

But the image was thankfully overlapped by the wall as Pidge succeeded in leading Lance around the corner and along the rest of the corridor. Lance focused his eyes directly ahead at him, feeling as though he’d witnessed something intensely private.

“So,” she chirped once they were solidly out of ear shot.

She released Lance’s wrist rather gingerly, like he may run away if she weren’t watching carefully enough.

“So,” Lance echoed in response.

“I’m not going to ask you how you’re feeling,” Pidge told him, and Lance offered her a grateful smile. “You’re clearly fine if you’re mooning over Keith and Shiro like that.”

Lance’s smile dropped along with his gratefulness. He tried to scoff; it lodged itself in his throat hard enough for him to cough. Pidge just snickered as he struggled to catch his breath.

“Woah woah woah woah woah, I’m not mooning over  _ anyone, _ ” Lance retorted, though it lacked a certain poison when he wheezed it out.

“Oh yeah,” one of Pidge’s brows arched high enough to disappear under her choppy bangs. “Then what was that back there with Keith?”

“What do you mean?” Lance realised how unfair it was that trying to sound neutral only made him sound suspicious. “I just looked at him. There’s nothing weird about looking. It would have been weird if I  _ hadn’t  _ looked at him.”

“Sure, buddy,” Pidge responded airily.

It would have infuriated Lance less if she’d rebuffed him outright. The nonchalance felt like a splinter he couldn’t pull from beneath his skin; it promised to fester.

As though sensing his mounting belingerence, Pidge shoved her tablet under Lance’s nose. He took the immediate distraction, hands clasping around the thin device. It was deceptively sturdy, and weighed next to nothing, and the physics of it bent Lance’s mind a little. Pidge tapped an icon in the corner, and the device obediently dissolved into a sleek maze of glowing teals threads.

“This is a basic 3D rendering of the ship’s interior architecture. I’ve labelled the communal and recreational spaces, and colour coded the room functions for you.”

Lance scanned the image carefully, mimicking the way Pidge had swiped her fingers to rotate and scale the ghostly model of the ship.

“Star Gallery,” he listed the name as he zoomed in on the area. “What’s that?”

“Oh you’re gonna like that one,” Pidge told him. Her grin had been reigned back from fiendish to merely mischievous. “It’s actually the observation deck, but you insisted we call it the Star Gallery. It’s your second favourite room in the castle.”

“What’s my first?” 

Lance was too swept up in imagining the otherworldly view from an observation deck this deep into space, that he didn’t notice what Pidge was swiping to until he glanced back down.

“That one,” Pidge told him, voice thick with mirth.

Lance would have gulped, but his mouth had gone dry enough for his tongue to stick to the roof of his mouth.

The words on the screen seemed to glow more harshly than the rest, which was the reason he told himself he was squinting at it.

KEITH/LANCE/SHIRO BEDROOM

The label was disproportionately small compared to the feelings that erupted behind Lance’s sternum.

There was a veritable Pandora’s Box of stolen moments and half formed dreams that came spilling from the dark recesses of Lance’s mind. His thoughts felt fogged and sluggish as they unfolded from where they had been packed tightly for so long. Thin fancies of what it might be like to wake up curled amongst Shiro’s strong arms, fleeting curiosities of what Keith’s hair felt like, and what it would feel like to touch him, not even sexuallly, but just  _ once.  _ Lance didn’t think he’d so much as shaken Keith’s hand at the Garrison. 

Their names packed so tightly against each other next to the word “bedroom” compounded all of these fantasies to tell Lance that yes, up until now, the three of them were indeed packed together.

He wasn’t sure how to turn the tablet off, so his hands simply ejected it.

“What the fuck!” Pidge cried as the thin device clattered to the floor. “Dude, don’t break my equipment.”

“I-uh-” 

Lance considered himself fairly intelligent, and at the very least, competent at multitasking. But he was only really good at juggling tangible problems, and had little to no experience managing multiple emotional responses. Which meant that he sorely lacked the bandwidth to respond to Pidge appropriately, as he was currently focusing all of his brain power on sorting through an overwhelmingly complicated sum of feelings.

“Oh, Lance…” Pidge paused as she scooped the tablet off the floor. “Hey, man, I’m sorry. I didn’t think I was gonna break you.”

Her voice was like a focal beacon, and Lance swam out to it and clutched on for dear life.

Pidge, yes, focusing on Pidge was safe.

“Sorry,” he coughed out. “For dropping your tablet.”

Pidge eyed him warily, dusting imaginary dust off the device, “It’s cool…”

Lance offered her the brightest smile he had in his arsenal, desperate to shed the skin of uncertainty. “What do you guys do for fun around here?”

Pidge observed him cautiously for as long as she could before her slyness got the better of her, and bled into a wicked smile.

“Oh, you’ve got lots to catch up on, Lance.”

Her wicked smile might have held up were it not for the sudden shaking beneath their feet. Lance’s knees wobbled, and he veered sideways to catch himself on one of the hallways pillars.

Pidge had lowered into nearly a full squat, her head tucked into the high collar of her shirt as she braced against the shuddering of the castle.

It couldn’t have lasted more than a few ticks, but Lance remained clutching the pillar for a moment after the shaking had dissipated, unsure of his stance on letting go and stepping back into the great openness of the corridor.

“What the heck was that,” he demanded as Pidge straightened up.

“Uuuuuh,” Pidge hummed. 

Her eyes were cast toward the high ceiling in speculation, though it looked more as if she were contemplating the actual ceiling rather than her response, “Routine castle maintenance.”

When Lance cast her a dubious look, she added, “It’s over ten thousand years old. So it needs a few repairs now and then, so what?”

She didn’t wait for a reply, simply striding off down the hall with all the distance her short legs could carry her.

Lance shrugged to himself. Pidge didn’t seem worried, and so he felt, with his inferior understanding of technology, that neither should he.

It took Lance about thirty minutes, or dobashes as Pidge called them, (were they longer?) to understand that the green paladin’s scope for “lots” was much greater than his own. Usually when people said “lots” they meant more than was comfortable to absorb in sixty seconds, or more than quite a bit but not enough to be overwhelming.

Lance felt thoroughly overwhelmed. Not only had he learnt about the context for their displacement in space and subsequent residency of an ancient war ship created by a near-extinct alien race, but Pidge had been rattling off words that didn’t even resemble English for the past three corridors. Lance’s short term memory had reached saturation at least two corridors prior, and so now the rest of her rapid prattle merely skimmed his immediate reception before they were lost entirely to the reverb of the ship. 

“Aaaaaaand this is the way to the bridge. We have shuttles that take us down to our lions super fast in case of an emergency,” Pidge finished triumphantly as she jabbed the door button to the main room. 

The action was so punctuated, Lance half expected her to click her heels for a full cadance. 

The doors to the bridge thrummed apart, allowing them to step into the wide room. Hunk and Allura stooped over the main control panel side by side. Her hand was hooked firmly over one of his round shoulders. Hunk’s fingers curved gently around her waist.

“What’s up, lovebirds!” Lance called as he stepped with Pidge into the room.

Both Hunk and Allura popped up from their positions, standing tall and to attention. Their hands slipped from one another, but lingered close enough that they could link fingers if they wanted to.

Though Allura looked somewhat bemused, Hunk broke into a grin he looked like he’d been saving, “Lance, buddy, hey! Coran finally let you out!”

“Yeah, I thought he was gonna keep me foreVER OOF!” Lance felt the end of his sentence squeeze out of him as Hunk swept him into a bone crushing hug.

“Okay, buddy,” he garbled, patting one hand over Hunk’s shoulder blade. “Kinda like breathing.”

Hunk propped Lance back on his feet ceremoniously, pushing him back at arms length to take in the full scale of him.

“You look great!”

“Such a charmer,” Lance patted Hunk’s forearm. 

“Lance,” Allura appeared beside his best friend, all ready to wrap a hand around Lance’s bicep. “I’m so glad you’re back on your feet. Things were admittedly starting to get a bit quiet around here.”

“Aw,” Lance batted his eyelashes. “You missed me.”

Allura rolled her eyes, and gave Hunk a kiss on the cheek for good measure. Hunk failed spectacularly at hiding a grin that bordered on smug. Lance couldn’t find a single shred of himself begrudging; even with his limited experience of their relationship, the two of them had an joyful ambience that seemed to permeate. 

Lance glanced up at the screen Hunk and Allura had been huddled around, curious. Like Pidge’s tablet, there was a ghostly 3D rendering of what looked like a meteor, though this one sat suspended in midair. The pixels that formed the fiery trail that streamed from the meteor’s tips were crackling into short choppy bursts of colour, making the whole tail look like an entire rainbow spectrum. It was a beautiful formation, even in spite of the hologram’s skeletal representation.

“Wowzers trousers,” Lance raised his eyebrows. “What is  _ that?” _

Allura, Hunk, and Pidge all glanced back over to the rendering. Pidge with muted curiosity, though Hunk and Allura look distinctly resigned.

“That,” Allura began. “Is the Deus Persei comet. It circles one of the widest perimeters in the galaxy.”

“Cool,” Lance replied, for want of a more adequate word. “How come it’s on fire though? I thought the tail only appeared due to the heat from a meteor entering a planet’s atmosphere?”

“Oooh,” Hunk bounded forward a full leap, a mad grin widening over his face. “So this is the cool thing! The blaze is because it’s travelling so fast, the atoms can’t get out of the way fast enough, so they kinda condense into that multi-coloured tail you’re looking at.”

“Oh, so like air particles causing a sonic boom?” Lance queried.

Hunk nodded in excitement, “Yup, same kinda principle. But here’s where it gets awesome - The comet itself is actually made out of this super rare material that burns at one billionth the rate of other space ore, even under intense heat. Which means it’s just gonna keep burning on and on for the next 4 million light years and then some.”

“Holy mackerel,” Lance breathed. “That is pretty awesome, Hunk, you’re right.”

Hunk’s grin just kept getting broader. This usually happened when he got started on a roll, like his mouth was showing all of its teeth so it would get the words out faster.

“Yeah! And not just that, but when it passes close enough to a planet, it throws off large chunks of its material which makes this really pretty meteor shower-”

“Ahem!” Allura cleared her throat loudly.

Hunk froze immediately. His grin shrank and vanished, hiding all its teeth away again, stifled.

“I was just telling Lance about the Lions,” Pidge chirped as she appeared on Hunk’s other side. “Do you think piloting might jog his memory?”

Lance’s attention instantly shifted from the comet. Truthfully, he had wanted to hear more about the meteor shower. It sounded like something he might have dreamed up when he was younger, with his thoughts already drifting towards the Garrison, not out of desire to serve, but as a means to reach the stars. A veritable rain storm of every colour known, cascading down in infinite pieces. It sounded like the perfect romantic background; a true dream of space.

Hunk audibly winced at Pidge’s words, as he said “Count me out of Lance taking his first joyride again, I barely survived the original.”

“What?” Lance frowned, offended. “It can’t have been that bad.”

The ashen look Pidge and Hunk shot each other held more argument than either of them could have put into words.   
“I’m also a little trepidatious about Lance piloting,” Allura chimed in. “It’s quite a bold step for someone fresh out of the infirmary.”

“Dude, could’ve been out like two movements ago if Coran wasn’t such a stick in the mud. That guy’s more stubborn than a slow moving flarnak.”

Three sets of eyes blinked at him. Three mouths opened with a small gasp.

Hunk asked, “Movements?”

Pidge cried, “Slow moving flarnak?”

Allura enquired, “You remember?”

Lance blinked back at them, his own mouth closing slowly. He could feel his tongue shrinking back behind his teeth, the words unknown to it.

“I… Have no idea what I just said.”

Three pairs of shoulders sagged with a sigh. 

“Dude, you seriously almost had me there,” Hunk moaned. He looked a lot more put out than either of the girls, and Lance couldn’t help but feel a little bad.

“This is good, actually,” Allura assured him. Her hand returned to Hunk’s shoulder to trace small soothing circles with her fingertips “It means that pieces of Lance’s memory are coming back.”

Pidge wasted no time in insisting, “Which is  _ why  _ I think it’d be good if he piloted his lion.”

“You just wanna see how fast it takes him to tank it,” Hunk narrowed his eyes at her.

“Yeah, and how long it takes to fix,” Pidge didn’t hesitate to admit. She adjusted her glasses to an angle that made her eyes look that much more sinister as she dialed calculations into her tablet. “For science.”

Allura frowned unpleasantly, but her hand paused where it was perched upon Hunk’s shoulder.

“I actually have to agree with Pidge. Piloting Blue may help Lance recover some of the data.”

“Data” was not a word Lance recognised in accordance with his memory. He wondered if it was an Altean thing.

“Data…” he repeated, trying the word out on his tongue.

Three sets of eyes turned to him again, all wearing matching expressions of discomfort.

“Uuuuh,” Hunk grabbed Lance roughly by the arm, using his superior brawn to direct the blue paladin towards the shuttle pods. “So the lions are this way. You just step on the dial and it’ll take you down there.”

Lance instinctively resisted the manhandling, digging his heels in like a donkey. Years of being dragged to the dentist, the doctor, the barber, school photographs, had taught him that people only pushed when they thought you wouldn’t move freely. He doubted that the castle had any of these things, but gut reactions were hard to shake.

“Woah woah woah, hey hold up! You can’t just shove me into an aluminium tube and expect me to know what I’m doing!”

“It’s actually an altenium tube, and it’ll take you straight down to your lion,” Hunk told him with a smile that looked uncomfortably wide for his face. “I’ll meet you out there in yellow.”

“Out there?!” Lance threw his weight back. It did little to hinder the trajectory Hunk was pushing him onto. “You mean out in space?”

With a final shove, Hunk successfully deposited Lance into the foreboding tube.

“You’ll be fine! You’ll be in Blue, she’s airtight.”

“So I won’t be able to breathe?!”

Hunk only saluted him with two fingers before the tube doors snapped closed, leaving Lance in a dim case, illuminated only by the small teal floor lights.

Lance barely had a second to focus on them before they slif from his view, leaving him to drop with the floor down a long passageway.

Getting to the “lion” was an experience all of its own. 

Lance couldn’t say whether or not he was happy to have forgotten it, or sad that he wasn’t better prepared for both a zipline and a rocket shuttle. Both seemed unreasonably superfluous, but then again, he supposed they were appropriate for an alien ship.

Memory or not, nothing could have prepared him from entering the blue lion. Not even the thematically coloured light that had strobed his descent into the great machine, not the gradually advancing tech that had carried him there.

When he stepped into the cockpit, the room flickered into life instantly. Complicated sets of dials and symbols floated above and around their respective consoles, all a spectacular shade of azure Lance didn’t quite think he’d seen before. The massive front screen shimmered away from it’s flat opaqueness to reveal the muted teal of the hangar doors as they opened slowly. He stepped gingerly around the pilot seat before settling into it, giving his hips a wiggle to get comfortable. A sharp hissing sound emitted from either side of him, and the flights moved obediently into his reach. 

The power thrumming through the entire body of the ship shook its way up through Lance’s feet until it found his spine, making him vibrate with anticipation; he felt a grin stretch unbidden across his face.

“Alright baby,” he murmured, wrapping his fingers around the matching joysticks. “Let’s see what you can do.”

“Hangar doors are open, you two,” Allura’s voice rang rich out over the hangar. “Activating comms now.”

As an afterthought, she added, “It’s the button on your right that looks like a wave- Oh!”

But Lance’s fingers were already withdrawing from the button she’d described, having found their own way there the second she’d mentioned ‘comms’.

“Oh,” Lance echoed. 

There would be time to dwell on it later; Lance had a handful of ancient war tech and egregious lack impulse control. Tapping a button would have to be chalked up to muscle memory for now.

Without waiting for further prompt, he tugged on the controls instinctively, the way his body knew how. The ship seemed just as eager to comply as Lance was to fly, and it shot out of the hangar with a warbled roar of the engine. Lance didn’t think he’d ever heard a machine like it before. The speed had his body pressing back into the pilots seat, and it squeezed the laughter out of his lungs like a tube of toothpaste. He whooped long and loud as the ship shot a wide arc around the castle.

“Hey Lance,” Hunk’s voice crackled over the comms. “Take it easy there buddy, this is your maiden voyage, technically.”

“Sorry, can’t hear you!” Lance cried. His hands had their own life, spinning and pulling and coaxing the ship in ways he had never dreamed possible. “Too busy being the best pilot in the universe!”

Pidge’s voice drifted through the comms from a distance, though even through the quietness, her sarcasm was undeniable. “Oh christ, I forgot Lance used to be like this.”

“Coming up on your six,” Hunk’s voice came through tinny on the open line.

Lance obligingly steered his ship in a semi circle as his grip on the thruster laxed, all the speed leaving his joyride.

He thought before that he had been unprepared for the cockpit, but he found now that what he truly had not anticipated was the literal interpretation of their machines.

When Pidge had told Lance it was a “lion”, he’d assumed the term was figurative; A mighty mechanical beast of a ship to seed hope and harvest triumph. He had not, per se, thought it would be an  _ actual _ lion.

“Holy crow,” he cried to the empty cockpit. “Look at the size of that thing, Hunk!”

Hunk’s chuckle echoed through the line, “Yeah, Yellow’s a big old boy. He’d got the most armour, so what he lacks in speed he makes up for in bulk.”

“What does mine look like?” Lance took off immediately, spinning his lion in a circle.

It was surprisingly move flexible than he’d thought, the body curving into a heavy bend as he chased the sleek tail.

“Slow down, bud, before you hurt yourself,” Hunk warned him. “Blue’s thing is ice and sonar. You’ve got a cannon for each.”

“What? This?” Lance smacked a random button that looked tantilisingly large. 

On cue, a bright beam of white blue light shot out in front of his screen, just off to Hunk’s side, before it was swallowed by the dark infinity of space.

“Jeez, watch it!” Hunk yelped, his voice dipping as Yellow barrel rolled sideways.

“I’d like to remind you that the weapons are not a toy, Lance,” Allura noted as a video feed of the bridge burst into life on screen.

Pidge sat behind her, looking nothing short of amused. It was the only emotion that seemed to encompass both her glee and her boredom.

“Glad to see you found the ice beam,” she told him with a wink.

“Yeah… Sorry, Hunk,” Lance rubbed the back of his neck.

“It’s cool, buddy. I forgot for a sec you were just experienc-”

Whatever Hunk had been saying dropped behind a strange slide of static that hummed in Lance’s ears. He felt something at the corner of his mind, tugging like it was trying to turn a page. It reminded him of the ambience of an empty room or being underwater; quiet, but unmistakably alive. He could feel it rolling around his psyche, feeling for a niche. Something flashed in Lance’s memory that he felt all the way through to his eardrums; an inimitable roar, at the same time that the presence  _ pushed  _ and Lance sat back heavily in his chair.

“What’s-” his mouth gasped the word. “What  _ is  _ that?”

Pidge and Allura glanced at each other on the screen in front of him; Lance vaguely registered the movement as his eyes stared off into middle distance. He felt like he was seeing a plane of reality that wasn’t truly there.

Allura was the first to offer an explanation, “Your mind is linked to the Blue Lion, Lance. It’s likely she’s responding to your return.”

“She’s saying hello!” Hunk offered instead, much more coyly.

“Huh,” Lance failed to think of a more appropriate response to the information that he was telepathically linked with an ancient war vessel. “That’s... neat.”

The blue lion seemed to think it was neat as well; he felt a warm roll of fondness ripple around his mind like an embrace. There was a taste to it that Lance couldn’t quite think of the name to, but it evoked senses that he hadn’t thought about in a while: His mother’s cooking, the smell of cigars, the vibrant and victorious elation that burst from swiping the last candy out of many vying hands.

He felt his eyes stinging, not with tears, only the threat. 

“Guys, is it always this,” Lance gulped. “ _ Intense? _ ”

“I actually have an explanation for this!” Pidge sat up straighter in her chair, adjusting her glasses that had slipped with the tilt of her grin. “The lions are extraterrestrial to us, and their language isn’t something we can consciously comprehend. So to bridge that language gap, they communicate by provoking sensory memories that best fit what they’re trying to convey.”

“Oh,” once again, Lance couldn’t generate a more eloquent response. “This feels like… Home?”

“She missed you,” Allura translated softly. “And she was worried. We all were.”

Lance felt the presence of the blue lion layer even more heavily over his mind, soaking him in sensory recall. 

“It’s a bit much,” he managed to gasp. 

The presence obligingly retreated, leaving with a whisper of a hand through his hair, chapped lips pressed to his forehead, a hot drink warming the bowl of his hands. Lance let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding, leaning out of his seat now he felt he could lift himself.

“Yeah, it can be overwhelming,” Hunk assured him. “It’s just ‘cause they care about us so much. Isn’t it boy?? Isn’t it?”

Lance could practically see his best friend rubbing the console as he cooed at the yellow yion. 

He listened for a moment, allowing Hunk’s nonsense speech to dissolve into a background noise whilst Lance stared out through the console screen. He could see the yellow lion, thick and heavy to his left, and the castle floating pale and imposing on his right, blinkering his vision between them. Lance looked and found his eyes taking a straight path out into the vast stretch of space. There was nothing beyond the inky dark canvas except about a billion stars, poking pinpricks through the black. Some flickered bright to dim, others burning through the rainbow spectrum of colour, but Lance couldn’t even begin to count them. It just stretched on and on, further than his eyes could see. And Lance could feel his wonder stretch with it, chasing an end that would never come. His hands twitched at the controls; the urge to fly straight and fast and  _ far  _ coursed through him and out into the tips of his fingers, curling them around each joystick.

This feeling wasn’t new; it was the entire reason Lance had joined the Garrison in the first place. This wasn’t something he’d forgotten and needed to remember, it was inside him all along.

“You let Lance out in Blue!?”

A new voice shattered through Lance’s reverie. He felt immediately, dishearteningly tethered. 

“Of course,” Allura replied to the person that had entered. “It’s his lion, and since paladins share a psychic bond with their lions, we thought it might stimulate his memory.”

“But he could hurt himself!”

Lance knew that voice, he’d heard it in bitten of words and ground out sentences that didn’t need saying. It provided too strongly a reminder of his limitations, of his hindrances.

He turned the blue lion back to face the castle, as if pointing its muzzle directly towards the addressee would emphasise his point somehow.

“Jeez, Keith, quit being such a stick in the mud. You’re just jealous I have the best lion on the team.”

There was a beat of silence, which Lance took to wonder if Keith had heard him or had just left all together.

It had only belied the response.

“I’m coming out there,” Keith announced curtly.    
“What? No! We don’t need you out here!” Lance argued, but he knew he’d lost the final word as he heard the stomp of Keith’s boots fading through the comm.

“I’m coming out there, too,” Shiro’s voice rang over the comms, rich and commanding.

Lance felt himself shrink bank in his seat for the second time that hour (or was it varga?).

“Okay,” he answered obediently.

His hands curled tighter around the controls to moderate the steady shake that began all the way up in his chest.

He’d only ever  _ seen _ Shiro fly before, he’d never been an active participant. It had been awe-inspiring and frightful and everything Lance wanted to achieve, and it had thrilled him in a way he couldn’t fully identify. It was only when he’d been staring at Shiro’s poster on his wall and wondering what those strong hands would look like gripped around the controls of a fighter jet, or gripped around something else, something softer, had he been able to put a name to it; Infatuation.

Lance felt giddy in his seat, and it flooded his body with an undiluted energy that destroyed his focus. He alternated between staring at the castle and his hands, bunched into fists around the joysticks. 

The red and black lions came zipping out from the belly of the castle, two moving points that grew in both size and formidity as they approached. The black lion was so decorated, it was no doubt that it was Shiro’s, the appendages on the lion’s back seemed to crown the smooth and steady flight. The red lion was definitely faster and more agile, and Keith flew it neatly, the way that had made Lance grind his teeth at the Garrison. It was a level of effortlessness he simply lacked the confidence to pull off. 

Despite the difference in the lions’ size, there was a noticeable synchronicity between them. They moved like they knew each other, staying away from colliding distance and yet still managing to look like they were being flown together, like two connecting parts making up a whole. It was almost exactly the way Lance remembering Shiro and Keith being in the Garrison hallways; symbiotic and trusting. The thought had his gut twisting unpleasantly.

“Lance,” Shiro’s voice burst through the comms. “How’s it going? You get a feel for Blue yet?”

“Uuuuh yeah,” Lance’s hand found its way to the back of his neck, and he felt relieved that Shiro couldn’t see his display of awkwardness. “I think she likes me.”

“Are you okay?” Keith sparked through on a new line. “You didn’t crash Blue, did you?”

The exasperation Lance felt was like a physical impulse; he rolled his eyes so hard that his head ached.

“No I didn’t, mullethead.”

“I was just  _ asking-” _

“Okay guys,” Shiro’s voice rolled over both of theirs with cool authority. 

The calls lined up beside each other, Keith’s stacked on top of Shiro’s. Even diminished to wiggly soundwaves, they looked good together, close. Lance couldn’t see how his name could wedge between theirs the way it had on Pidge’s castle map.

Pidge didn’t seem to have the same problem; a third channel struck up, falling to the top of the stack.

“I’m coming out in green,” she announced. “Allura thinks we should try forming Voltron and see if that reboots Lance’s memory.”

“Technically to reboot it, we’d have to shut it down completely first,” Hunk amended.

“Well, I’m not above suggesting brain death if it’ll help.”

“ _ No one  _ is killing Lance!” Keith snarled over the comms. Even his call line looked aggressive, erupting into a range of soundwaves the comm didn’t have the capacity to shape.

Lance let out a mirthless chuckle, “I actually agree with Keith on this one. That’s a hard  _ no  _ on killing me, please.”

“Everybody, calm down,” Shiro came through like a guardian angel. “We are not advocating for clinical death. Let’s just focus on some basic flying to see if Lance still has his moves.”

Lance had several queries to follow up on that, but they came secondary to a strange bitterness that had been lying dormant; he didn’t think Shiro would have asked Keith to just stick with basic flying. Lance could admit that he had a competitive streak, and it was just that, a streak; it was lean, and most of the time wasn’t a hindrance. But when it hit him, there was a potency to it that Lance couldn’t deny.

“Basic flying?” he scoffed, the need to prove himself curbing his tone into something derisive. “I’m way beyond that. Watch  _ this! _ ”

Lance pushed down  _ hard  _ on the throttle, and the ensuing cries of his name were lost to the electronic surge of the blue lion’s engines. Blue shot forwards fast enough to plaster Lance to his chair, hands hanging on for dear life around the controls. Neither the speed nor the handling mattered; the pocket of space where they’d docked was a vast playground, not a planet around for light years. It was the perfect place for Lance to go ham.

He twitched at the joysticks, coaxing Blue to spin and dive in a way he felt he’d known for eternity. Blue pressing at his mind, sharing in the raucous untamed joy with memories of a water fight, being chased by one of Lance’s older brothers, Christmas mornings.

The rest of the team was still calling his name through comms, but it didn’t matter at that moment. Lance knew he could fly higher, faster, stronger, until-

“LANCE!”

Shiro’s voice burst through the line with a refreshing sense of urgency. Lance span his lion messily out of its barrel roll and nearly got flattened by an asteroid in the process. He flicked the controls, avoiding it at the last second, but there was another moving into its place, bumping into smaller rocks and catalysing an endless chain reaction.

“You flew straight into an asteroid belt, idiot!” Pidge shrieked through the comm link.

Lance steered Blue through the shrapnel he could see. The problem was that the blue lion had a large number of blind spots due to her length and the limited maneuverability of her head. Lance mashed the ice beam button fast enough to blast through a few of the larger asteroids. The victory he felt was fleeting; shattering the rocks had only made more of them. Lance yanked on the joysticks just as a rogue asteroid slammed into Blue’s side.

He nearly fell out of the chair with the force of it, and a cry of surprise popped out of his mouth without his consent.

The rest of the team audibly panicked. Hunk was muttering something cynical and dramatic as Pidge whined in a jaded tone about past infractions that Lance didn’t remember. Shiro was making a concerted effort to calm them down, his tone unwavering and practical.

Keith was entirely absent from the commentary, and Lance was almost thankful until he felt a vigorous weight pull his lion forcefully sideways.

Through the visor he could see his trajectory whipping and sliding impossibly through the asteroid belt until he finally broke free from the chaotic maze of rocks.

“Are you an  _ idiot? _ ” Keith seethed through the comms. “Do you have any idea how dangerous that was? You could’ve been  _ killed,  _ Lance!”

“Keith?” Lance yelped.

He tugged on the controls, experimentally at first, and then frantically; it was no use. His lion was being held fast by what he presumed was Keith, in his much smaller, much faster, and apparently much stronger red lion.

“Hey! Let me go!” he shouted, pushing the joysticks as far as they would go.

There was the groan of straining metal, and the visor shifted at the titan effort Lance was putting into flying, but it was with little result

“No!” Keith shot back. “Since you obviously can’t fly properly.”

“Keith,” Shiro groaned through the comms. “Put Lance down.”

The black lion flew into view of the cockpit, and Lance shrank away from the controls like they’d scalded him.

He’d hoped he might impress Shiro with his flying, almost at the very same time he’d accepted that to be unlikely. But here Lance had only embarrassed himself, and had to be rescued by none other than Keith, star pilot, golden child, and Shiro’s favourite. Lance told himself he wouldn’t sulk, also, but here he was pouting at the controls of an ancient war beast.

The presence in the back of his mind rippled out a few shades of emotion. There was the comfort warmth of his mother’s arms around his shoulders, but Lance still got the impression he was being laughed at, as a hue of mirth brushed over his mind.

Keith grumbled something unintelligible through the comms, but Lance felt the clunky release of his lion detaching from Red’s claws. He prodded the controls warily, pulling Blue back just far enough away from Keith to make his indignation clear. Keith wasn’t visible from the outside of the Red lion, but Lance could remember his face well enough to imagine him sat, brow furrowed, mouth twisting, arms folded in a stubborn knot over his chest.

“You okay, Lance?” Shiro asked.

Lance shifted uncomfortably. “I’m okay, thanks, Shiro.”

Hot shame killed his urge to quip for cover the way he usually did.

Shiro broke the mounting silence as Pidge and Hunk joined them, “We should follow Allura’s suggestion and try to form Voltron. The connection between our minds could help Lance regain his memory.”

“Woah woah woah,” Lance struggled to absorb at least half of what Shiro had said. “What do you mean ‘connection between our minds’? Are you guys gonna be able to read my thoughts?”

“No one wants that, Lance,” Pidge quipped. “Ya nasty.”

“Uh, excuse me, my thoughts are extremely intelligent and pure thank you.”

Hunk muttered something that sounded vaguely like, “If that’s what you call ‘pure’,” before trailing off.

Lance stuck his tongue out at the comm link on screen and called it a victory.

“It’s not like that,” Keith struck up, the Red lion looming in Lance’s periphery. “It’s more like we connect to each other’s intention, emotion, intuition. Like a hive mind.”

“A hive mind,” Lance echoed, rolling the phrase around and over his tongue. “I can get behind that. That’s basically what a mission with the Garrison is like.”

“To a degree,” Shiro conceded mildly. “Can you fly in V formation, Lance?”

Logically, Lance knew he was being asked because of the amnesia. But emotion held a much louder and more immediate position in his thoughts, and so, emotionally, Lance sparked viciously at being singled out.

“Yes sir,” he barked. Hissed. Whatever.

Distantly, he heard Keith snicker, and so he stuck his tongue out at the comm link a second time. He’d blown his first chance to impress Shiro, but a second one was all he needed.

“Okay,” Shiro continued. “Everyone, on me! Lance, line up on the right flank, next to Keith.”

Lance did as he was told, gliding the joysticks in a controlled arch as the other lions ducked around his screen.

The five of them fell into an easy formation, their speed increasing gradually as they soar into the great wide nothingness of the galaxy. Lance glanced to his side as a flash of red passed his screen.

There was something grating about the red lion bobbing in his periphery. It felt familiar in a bad way; Keith nudging just ahead of him at every turn. Lance gripped the controls tighter. The urge to shove them forward into hyperdrive sat coiled in his wrists, hungry to flick out and overtake Keith like he knew he could.

“Okay, guys, focus,” Shiro directed them over the comms.

Lance wasn’t entirely sure what he was supposed to be focusing on, and since there was only the flank of the red lion occupying his attention, he was loath to resist how his eyes kept sliding over to it, chipped and marred but still shiny.

Flying in formation was already boring by default; the very name term was uniform, militant, devoid of personality. But it was amplified the longer they continued to sail in an unchanging straight line.

“Uuuuh, is everyone focusing?” Lance asked bluntly. “What exactly is supposed to be happening?”   
“We’re not in sync,” Keith replied. “We  _ all _ have to concentrate on forming Voltron.”

Lance snapped back, automatically defensive, “Well maybe you should concentrate harder then.”

“Let’s just turn around and try again,” Shiro told them firmly.

It was obvious in his tone that the argument was over. The small victory of having the last word felt like a welt inside Lance’s chest, strangely heavy and intensely unsatisfying. Obediently, they each turned their lions around, soaring back towards the castle as they settled into their formative positions once again.

“Focus,” Shiro ordered. “Open your mind to your fellow paladins.”

To say he was nervous about such a direction would be understating Lance’s presumption. His mind was deeper than he liked people to believe, and it was filled with thoughts he rarely took out himself. He wasn’t always confident about what would be reflected back at him if he dwelled upon them for too long.

Lance wondered if Shiro was the same, if there were dreams he stole away into the early hours of the morning when he wasn’t expected to be a leader or a captain. Lance wondered if Keith felt scared. His fearlessness was so easy that it had to be organic, just a part of himself he’d naturally been born with. Lance wanted to know what Keith was afraid of, if he was ever afraid at all.

His curiosity didn’t project, instead it sank down towards something deeper and more potent, until the concentration built enough to shift and then suddenly he felt it click.

Forming Voltron was not the weightless, celestial feeling the team had described to him. When Shiro had briefly described the astral plane to Lance, it had sounded a type of fantastical that pushed belief, and Lance had gone further to imagine it as a physical place that he could reach out and touch. It had been his brain’s way of understanding the construct; form it into something you could feel, that you could mold, and it became real.

It seemed like a silly notion, in hindsight. 

The connection that strung their minds together was not tangible, and it was not light.

There was a weight to it that could only be described through experience, sinking deep into his cerebral and outwards, like a medicine.

“Woah,” Lance felt his mouth breathe more than he heard himself say the word.

He could still see through his screenview, but the blue lion felt different, and his urge to fumble with the controls were both his own and not his at all. He felt like an extension of a very long current, a river meeting the sea.

Pidge’s comm link lit up as she whooped out a raucous victory, Hunk joining in with a war chant.

“Good job, everyone!” Shiro called out to them.

The resounding triumph was an echo chamber. Lance felt his own elation, and then a ripple of his teammates running alongside it merrily. Hunk’s was tinged with relief, and though he couldn’t feel it himself, there was the impression of an anxiety induced stomach cramped easing.

Pidge’s felt thick with smugness, with a sliver of pride that felt too private to pick at.

Shiro and Keith’s felt distinctly different.

Lance was a very good liar. He lied to everyone and he lied often, and he was so good at it that he barely remembered what the truth was half the time. There was no one Lance lied to better than himself.

He realised now that he had spent the past few days telling himself every version of this statement: “I am not together with Keith and Shiro. They are not in love with me, nor I with them.”

He’d folded this phrase into every shape he knew until it was familiar from all angles, and since it was familiar and he could recognise every iteration of it, he’d convinced himself it must be the truth.

But the problem with lying to yourself is that it has to come from one’s own mouth.

Lance could not tell himself that the feelings that sifted through him were false, because they did not belong to him.

_ Shiro?  _ He thought, as a warmth surrounded his mind, gentle but sure, powerful to the ends of the earth.

_ Keith?  _ He thought, as something frantic and ravenous sank its claws into his psyche, refusing to let go.

Their minds were just as alive as they were, and present, curious to the point of invasive. They rolled over Lance’s neatly drawn lie, examining, recoiling, before pushing closer again.

“Stop it,” Lance whispered aloud. 

This was an ugly part of himself that he was exceptionally talented at keeping hidden. He could not maintain a neat facade if they had already seen under the hood.

It was preemptive, Lance realised then. That perhaps Shiro and Keith hadn’t seen this part of him before, because they had not been together when they’d first arrived at the castle. Lance thought that was infinitely worse, and he self consciously crunched his mind into something else, poured his focus into the starry expanse just outside his visor screen.

“Ugh,” Hunk groaned through the comm link. “Is anyone else having a hard time keeping this up? This feels worse than usual.”

Lance knew it was his fault, and he was sure the team did too, but they had enough grace not to say it aloud.

“We all need to open our minds to each other,” Shiro told them calmly.

_ You need to open your mind to us,  _ Lance heard firmly.

His eyes were still glued to his screen, watching the cosmos zoom by. There was a shift in the lions, and a flash of yellow swung by the left of his vision.

It was only a brief glimpse, but the image of the yellow lion stacked topsy turvy on top of its massive body shook Lance from the mental pit he’d squatted in.

“Hunk are you…” Lance paused to look down at his own controls. The confusion shuddered out over the rest of his teammate’s mind in a closely linked chain. “Am I a  _ leg? _ ”

Keith let out a genuine bark of laughter. It crackled through the comms a second behind the amusement that wobbled through their mental link.

“Yeah, buddy!” Hunk whooped joyously. His smile was audible. “Welcome to Team Leg!”

“Don’t you mean team Voltron?” Pidge snarked.

Hunk snarked back, “Arms aren’t involved in this Pidge, private conversation, legs only.”

“Huh,” Lance hummed. “No dairy.”

A secondary jolt of humour came rattling through his mind, from somewhere else though. 

“I got that reference,” Shiro stated, the mirth thick in his tone.

Lance wasn’t sure if it was his amusement or someone else’s, but the hilarity that shimmered through his mind was infectious. His chuckled rolled into a cackle and onwards until he was laughing himself feral, the sounds of his teammates laughter sounding around the cockpit as it tickled his brain.

Somewhere through the tears, he wheezed, “It’s just- So RANDOM! I’m a  _ leg! _ ”

“Legs for days,” Pidge added, sending him off into a fresh peal of laughter.

“Oooooh wow,” Shiro finally managed to squeeze between chuckles. “Okay team, let’s pull it together.”

Lance felt the shift in his mind as Shiro focused. He’d seen videos on the internet of people who stacked dominos and set rows of them tumbling off in different directions. It was the best way he could think to describe the sensation that passed through him.

It was just as Keith had described, like a hive mind.

“Sorry,” Lance sighed, feeling the hilarity seep out of him, sticky and shiny as syrup. “I dunno why that just got me.”

“No need to apologise,” Shiro told him easily. “Voltron itself is an impossibly advanced feat of engineering and technology. It does seem pretty strange.”

“But it brought us all together,” Keith added quietly.

Lance felt a distant instinct to argue that them coming together was the most random thing of all. It was hushed by the memory of Keith’s mind brushing against his own, as close as it could get without fusing. 

“Let’s try some test runs,” Shiro ordered, breaking Lance out of his brief reverie. “Thrusters!”

The response Lance had was pavlovian. One moment his hands were wrapped around the joysticks, and the next he was pushing his weight into them without a conscious thought. He bid a swift thank you to muscle memory, and a longer prayer to his missing memory.

Flying as a part of Voltron was one of the strangest, most transcendent feelings Lance had ever experienced. Whenever there was an order to carry out or a thought on how to manoeuvre, it was as though his mind rewrote the moment before it arrived, to insist it had always been there, and that it had come from the collective brain, and not one individual. It was both thrilling and mesmerising.

Lance wasn’t sure if it was his own glee, or if he was simply riding the high of five strains of joy being mixed into one potent cocktail, but by the time Shiro ordered them to disband, his heart was pumping like he’d run a marathon.

“Great work, team!” Shiro said. He sounded slightly winded, and Lance conjured up an image of that heart-winning smile he’d seen plastered over all the Garrison flyers. “Let’s rendez-vous back at the castle. I think we’ve earned a break.”

Lance didn’t want a break. The thrill of Voltron still sparked through his veins, pumping hot headlessness into his body.

“I don’t think I can wind down after that,” Lance admitted. “I’m gonna be up all night.”

Keith chuckled quietly. “You usually are after forming Voltron.”

Perhaps there had been a private joke in there, Lance thought. Humour was not a colour he was used to seeing on Keith, and so his reflex was to translate it as a jibe. But he’d  _ felt  _ Keith’s humour through the psychic bond of Voltron, and that stopped Lance from pinning that title down. He could still feel the electric charm of it even as the connection faded.

“We’ll meet you back in the hangar, Lance,” Shiro told him. “For a quick debrief.”

Lance just grinned to himself, steering Blue dutifully back towards the castle of lions. 

Voltron was still on his mind as he breezed through the hangar doors, and he allowed it to swim through his conscious thought so that he might lounge a little longer in the come down, letting muscle memory see to setting Blue down right.

His fingers were reluctant to release the controls, as if by doing so, the high of his maiden flight might slip away with the loss of contact. Indulgently, he remained seated for a few more dobashes, leaning back in the pilot’s chair with a rare satisfied sigh.

Blue’s consciousness settled around him like a blanket. She seemed equally sated by their short voyage, and she sent Lance impressions of a good night’s rest, a full belly, the gratifying crack of an aching joint.

“I know, girl,” Lance cooed, petting one arm rest dopily. “Me too.”

The blue lion shuddered minutely; a mechanical purr.

Two figures appeared on Lance's screen, entering the hangar as Blue tipped her head down a fraction, accented in red and black, white and teal.

Lance was out of his seat in an instant, clutching the wall as the blue lion lowered her body down to open the gangway from her maw. As her jaws spread, Lance half ran half stumbled down the ramp, limbs uncooperative with the change in gravity and the buoyancy of dopamine.

Shiro and Keith’s faces mirrored his own, their grins crooked and their steps messy as they picked up their approaching pace.

Lance hadn’t planned to throw himself into their arms. In hindsight, Lance couldn’t discern a conscious thought about it, but his body had seemed to know what to do. It was automatic, ritualistic, how his arms had flung wide to hook them both as his body sagged into the cradle they’d made with their own. Lance tucked his face under Shiro’s jaw with a smile wide enough to burst his cheeks, and had felt the other man’s pulse leap against his temple. His fingers wove into Keith’s hair where it was thick and curled at this nape of his neck, drawing him close enough to crush all three of them together. Lance laughed with a lightness that made his head spin. His breath couldn’t leave his body fast enough and it was making him giddy to the point of sickness.

There was a thick arm looping under his own, pressing flat and hard against the armour of his back to draw him in. Another one bunched in an unrefined knot at the bridge somewhere between his shoulder and his ear, the fingers clutching and loosening in a mad loop. 

It couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds.

The problem with elation was that it was a fleeting high that passed all too quickly. The subsequent emptiness rarely felt worth it, for the space without the feeling felt so much bigger than the space that contained it, even if they were one and the same.

As the spike of dopamine faded, reality slipped into his veins, and Lance could begin to feel exactly what his arms were full with.

Shiro’s chest felt even broader than it looked, bound in the heavy paladin armour he’d donned. Lance couldn’t feel Keith’s hair through his gloves, but that was secondary to the realisation that this was probably the first time he had ever touched Keith Kogane, save for the stolen grasp of his hand that night in the infirmary. He was wiry and tough and solid, exactly the way Lance thought he would be.

Lance blinked and then gasped, his arms slipping from Keith and Shiro faster than the smile on his face. He stepped back one hasty, inelegant stride, and stared at them as the imminent berth of hollowness swallowed him. 

Shiro was staring at him wide eyed and open mouthed and empty armed. His eyebrows had disappeared somewhere behind his white forelock. 

Keith looked like he’d been slapped, his lips not quite deciding if they wanted to close, and his fingers bunching into a fist that looked like it had intention.

“Sorry,” Lance gasped, the word sounding like a shell of what it was meant to be. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think-”

“It’s okay,” Shiro said calmly, taking a step forward. He winced at the step Lance took back. “Lance, hey, I mean it. It’s okay. We’re a team, and teammates hug. This was a successful mission.”

Lance nodded dumbly. All the words he wanted to say felt stuck to his tongue, glueing his mouth shut. “Teammates,” he repeated with some effort. Keith and Shiro didn’t look too happy with the weight of that word.

Lance continued, “Right. You’re right, this was a success. Voltron is… Pretty awesome.”

He forced a smile. Shiro and Keith did not reciprocate, which only made it feel stiffer on Lance’s face. 

“Ye-heeeeeah, go Lance!” Hunk’s voice erupted suddenly around the hangar, and all three of them turned to see him skipping through the bay doors, Pidge trotting diligently by his side. “You nailed it, dude!””

Lance rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. Under normal circumstances, he would have preened at the praise. But normal circumstances did not include the feeling of Keith’s hand gripping his waist, or the scent of Shiro’s aftershave till tucked into his olfactory. 

“Thanks, guys,” he grinned at Pidge and Hunk. “But it’s a team effort, right?”

“Did it work?”

Allura’s voice rang through the hangar clear as a bell. Lance didn’t think he’d ever hear a voice that fit that description, but for Allura it seemed to be the  _ only _ descriptor that fit. She marched purposefully towards them, her hands gripping a tablet and her face gripping an expression of wary hope. Coran strode behind her, fingers wringing into a cradle that seemed to disagree with the fabric of his gloves.

“Yeah!” Lance grinned at her, punctuating his point with a hearty thumbs up. “Consider Voltron  _ formed,  _ m’lady. Next week,  _ roundhouse kicks!  _ Gotta put the right leg to good use now this guy’s back on the controls.”

Lance shined his knuckles against his paladin armour for show, shooting a wink in Pidge’s direction. She sneered at him, the tip of her tongue spearing out the side of her mouth.

Allura frowned at Lance as she stepped towards them, but turned to Shiro as she asked, “Does he remember anything?”

Shiro and Keith glanced at each other as the rest of the group looked their way. Lance found he couldn’t quite meet their gazes yet, and so instead he watched their hands as they bunched in eerie unison, both grasping at some phantom object before releasing as the digits realised it wasn’t there. 

“We don’t know,” Shiro said carefully.

Lance hadn’t meant to look at him, but Shiro’s eyes snared him all the same, the fine lines around them tightening in a way that made him look older than he was.

“Uuuh,” Lance swayed between his feet a little as all the attention shifted to him. “Nothing’s really coming to mind, if you’re asking me.”

In truth, he wasn’t sure who Allura was asking, as she kept looking between Shiro, Keith, and worryingly at Hunk. The fingers she curled around the tablet squeezed protectively over the screen as she pressed the device tighter to her chest.

Her voice was clipped as she asked, “You don’t remember anything? Nothing at all?”

“Um, I’m- I’m not sure,” Lance stuttered. 

He tried and failed to keep his eyes from Shiro and Keith. They caught him anyway, wearing matching expressions of strain. They were gripping each other’s hands rather desperately, too, Lance noticed, but he didn’t want to stare at that very much, as he abruptly remembered the whisper of Shiro’s fingers against his cheek, and the taste of Keith’s knuckles against his mouth.

“If there’s even a single detail-” Allura started before Hunk looped an arm around her shoulders.

They immediately shrank away from her ears, which only told Lance how high she’d held them in the first place.

“It was just the first time,” Hunk told her soothingly. “We can always try again.”

His voice had dropped low enough for Lance to think that maybe he wasn’t meant to hear those words, but he couldn’t stop from blurting, “Am I missing something?”

Silence was an anticipatory thing. To quieten an entire squad in wake of their collective fussing told Lance in broad strokes that he’d been left out of something very important.

Shiro was frowning at Allura, the grey in his eyes glinting hard like flint in what looked like a concerted effort to communicate with her in morse code. Keith was still watching Lance, his brow folded low over his eyes. Hunk was the worst culprit. Growing up together had given them both an acute sensitivity to each other’s expressions. Hunk knew this as well as Lance, and had preemptively turned his face into Allura’s shoulder in a weak attempt to hide.

Lance lifted his chin towards the one person that seemed able to meet his eye.

“Pidge,” he started slowly. “What’s going on.”

Pidge glanced sideways at Allura, muttering, “You should just tell him. It might help?”

“Tell me what?” Lance demanded. “Why am I the only one being left out?!”

“No one’s trying to leave you out, Lance,” Shiro told him gently, his metal hand reaching out to rest on Lance’s elbow before retreating again swiftly.

Allura let out a sight that sounded like she’d been holding in for years. Hunk’s arm tightened around her shoulders as her body sagged. Her arm cautiously unfolded the device from where she’d pressed it flush against her body.

“Before your injury, we set out to acquire some intel,” she began quietly. “It was for an upcoming extraction mission which, unfortunately, is incredibly time sensitive.”

Lance’s eyes followed the shapes Allura’s fingers traced across the tablet screen with rapt attention. The was a heaviness to her movements that didn’t suit her, and he got the distinct impression that the rest of the story wasn’t favourable. 

“I didn’t mention it before, but the castle’s thrusters have almost completely deteriorated. We think they’ll hold just enough for one more wormhole jump.”

“Remember that weird shaking from earlier?” Pidge reminded him.

Lance nodded his vague understanding. “But we can fix them, right?”

Allura’s smile had stretched uncomfortably, rueful, her lips not quite reaching wide enough to show her teeth. “Yes, we can. The problem is, the material we need only comes from a very rare occurrence.”

Allura’s face twisted in that way that people’s did before delivering bad news, “Like an ages old comet passing within the planet’s atmosphere for the first time in two thousand years.”

Lance frowned. He was adding two and two and coming up with three, inexplicably.

“Why can’t we just pick up the debris after the meteor has passed?”

Allura shook her head woefully. “The debris from the Deus Persei comet is heavier than the planet’s crust. If we don’t excavate it within 24 hours, it’ll sink beneath the surface and out of our reach. We’ll be stuck.”

Lance crossed his arms, one finger tip digging into the worn thread of his jacket. The problem Allura was presenting didn’t seem impossible, but there stood a ring of flat lined mouths and solemn downcast eyes around him that said otherwise.

“Well, when is the comet gonna pass the planet?” Lance asked, though he got the impression that everyone else already knew the answer.

Allura looked up at him, her face grave, “In just over two movements.”

“Two and a bit weeks,” Hunk translated.

Lance glanced around the group. It seemed exceptional to him how they had all come together. They were neither one of the same species, Shiro a leader, Keith a spitfire, Hunk a worrier to the core but driven by hunger for knowledge and an inherent need to understand in order to fix. And yet, they collectively wore anxiety the same; in pinched brows and even tauter postures.

Lance didn’t like to feel like he was stating the obvious, especially when it felt everyone else had had a shot at pointing it out before him, but he still had to ask, “So let’s just go to this planet and get the ore then?”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Coran finally chimed in.

He’d been standing uncharacteristically silent to Allura’s side, but he took a small bound towards Lance, drawing the group’s attention.

“You see, we don’t actually know the name of the planet, and since it was in the same system as Altea was before Zarkon destroyed it, it’s become somewhat hard to locate just based on ore deposits.”

“But you said you sent someone to get intel,” Lance argued. “Why can’t we just ask them what the planet is called?”

As soon as the words left his lips, Lance knew the answer.

He felt his stomach sink down to his heels, and the weight of everyone’s gaze on him pinned it there to writhe. This did not feel restful, Lance thought, the powerless of the situation made his bones ache.

And the silence hung around them, waiting, anticipating.

And of course it was Keith, who took a solitary step forward to utter the answer.

“Because you don’t remember.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Find me on Tumblr! ](http://boscribbles.tumblr.com/)   


**Author's Note:**

> Would love to hear your feedback!! Also you can find me on Tumblr @boscribbles


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